In a subject like the one I teach, most, if not all, of our students have some outside commitments. If it's not work, it's children, or other family, who need looking after. Sometimes it's both. This, naturally, means that in some cases, attendance can be rather sporadic.

However, it still seems to obey Murphy's Law. Just because a student hasn't turned up all week does NOT mean they won't turn up to your lesson. And they are most likely to do this when you've planned (and made resources) for the class without them there.

Conversely, you can't guarantee that a particular student will be in your lesson. You have to plan for all the students being in class, but allow for some of them being absent.

It's a barrier to learning, and it's also a possible problem. It is, therefore, something I need to start including in my lesson plans, because student absence or attendance still throws me from time to time.

What's irritating is the waste of resources when the former is the unexpected event.

So the powers-that-be of the college decided that for some reason, Blogger was a naughty naughty website, and blocked it, hence the hiatus. Fortunately, I've been able to persuade them to unlock it for me. I'm all for a monitoring system to stop students accessing damaging, offensive, or inappropriate material, but the trouble is that even safe sites aren't supposed to be used in class time. I can't help thinking it's a shame there's no way to use the NHS system, which I discovered in my time as a temp- certain catergories of internet site- e-mail, internet shopping, and similar- were blocked completely during working hours, but unblocked at lunch-time and after 5pm. If there was a way to achieve that for lesson times for different students, it might help a very great deal. That said, the new software that the college is trialling which allows the teacher to see the students' screens on their PC, take over control of their computers, switch off the monitors and other such measures, seems to be an excellent idea- though like any electronic resource (actually, like almost any resource you use in teaching)- it's important to know how it works, and what it can do, if you're to use it effectively.

I've been making a conscious effort to think about how I assess students learning, since we had the input sessions on assessment. Most of the work I do is formative assessment, since the only class I am a personal tutor for is one I see for only 3 hours a week. So the best thing I can do for most of my students is tell them how they're getting on and attempt to stop them making common mistakes- "what it is?" or "I was go" for example.

I'm still considering the communication paper. It seems to me that, teaching ESOL as I do, talking about techniques for communicating to students should be quite straightforward, as it's much easier for us to tell if we've been understood or not, since we have to work to ensure that the instructions are comprehensible at a most basic level- did they understand all the words? Instruction Check Questions were one of the first things we learned about on my CELTA course, and I still use them. They're a very effective way to make sure that communication has taken place, at least in terms of instructions. But what interests me, and what I want to be able to talk about in my paper, is the non-verbal elements of communication, since the cultural issues within that are quite major. A smiling Italian student will probably be happy. A smilling Bengali or Japanese student may well be extremely angry or annoyed- smiling is their way of covering this up, and the broader the grin, the worse you're doing. What interests me is how we as teachers might be able to try to gain enough cultural understanding to be sensitive to what different students are communicating, and what we as teachers are saying without speaking. Also, often people behave how we expect them to- by which I mean that you can get into quite the cycle of behaviour if you're not careful- you expect poor behaviour, so you become 'controlling parent' which brings out the student's 'uncoooperative child', leading to MORE poor behaviour. Similarly- you might expect a particular student to be quiet, or shy, because of their culture (I'm talking about peoples' perceptions rather than the truth), which would lead you to treat them in a particular way, which may or may not be appropriate to the student.

More thoughts later (hopefully). Now, cover lesson.