Textbooks are weird

My time teaching is quickly coming to an end! With just four days of teaching left (!!!!), I'm close to hanging up my teaching boots, at least for the time being. As the year draws to a close, I thought I'd give an overview of the kinds of lessons I've taught throughout the past nine months. I've mentioned classes a few times on this blog, and I frequently tell people about how bizarre my lesson topics often are, but here is a pretty comprehensive list of all the strange themes Austrian English textbooks handle (at least the ones my school uses).

As I've said before, the nature of my job changes a lot based on which teacher and which class I'm working with on any given day. One teacher lets me talk about literally anything I want to each and every week, so for those classes I've chosen topics from the US Election to holidays to travel to food to gun control to Country Music, and more. Most of the other teachers give me a little more instruction, sometimes asking me to work through activities from the book, sometimes asking me to come up with an activity or lesson based on the themes in the book, and sometimes asking for something timely or seasonal. For example, I taught on Thanksgiving, winter holiday traditions, the US election, gun control (when that started heating up a few months ago), and the US Economic system. Now it's these book topics that lead me to the kind of crazy lessons. Like the time I was asked to talk about Christmas in Australia. The nature of American Humor. Death. September 11th. Extreme Sports. Extreme Situations. Native Americans. etc etc etc.

Here are the tables of contents for the 6th and 7th form textbooks (these are 15-17 year olds)

Thank goodness I was never asked to talk about Victorian Times... 

Chapter 5 is why the students have knowledge of vocabulary like pathogen, intestinal disease,
hyperventilate, hypertension, avian...

Cheery topics like equality! Violence! Death! And Canada?

Make Your Way 7: Home of everyone's favorite chapter: HEADGEAR!

Some other true life chapter titles in the books for the lower grades include: You Are What You Eat, Dilemmas (very generic), The History Of Everyday Things, A Shopping Spree, Amazing Animals, Strange Things from Space, and one of my favorites, Virtual Worlds.

And since these books are all made in Britain, sometimes there is stuff that portrays America in a less than positive light. Like this gem, which makes Americans sound like jerks:

Like, HELLO....not.

Because I'm pretty sure people stopped using the "not" thing in the mid 90s.....psych!

We have a Facebook group for TAs across Austria, and every once in a while people will post topics they need help with, and reading those always makes me grateful for the classes I've been assigned, because some are just crazy. Some of these gems include genetically modified food, William the Conquerer, the Amish (this happens surprisingly often), celebrities, J-Pop, cancer, AIDS, Bollywood, the Red Scare, etc.

As much as I claim these things are bizarre, I have had a lot of fun working with some of these topics. For Dreams, I led the class in a discussion of Billy Joel's River of Dreams, for the various chapters on food (which appear in pretty much every textbook) I had a lot of fun with a matching game and presentation about regional food differences in the US. The violence, art, and death/dying chapters led to super interesting discussions, and all the jobs/employment chapters gave me the chance to be very practical with resume-building and interview practice. So while many of these topics are bizarre or depressing, I guess if you have to fill 8 years with English curriculum, you need to really exhaust all possible conversation topics. And I do appreciate that these students are expected to handle deep topics like globalization, environmental responsibility, and racism. I've been quite impressed with their abilities to honestly discuss these things in a foreign language. So while I give these books a hard time, there's some good stuff in them, and I've definitely had a blast using them this past year!