My thoughts on teaching and the end of my 1st/4th job

Although my new supervisor was a complete moron, I had started to get into the swing of things at my job. My hours had decreased, and my boss was very supportive of me. During the summer, my mother came to visit, and my boss took us both out a couple of times and was quite generous.

Although the working conditions were getting better, some other issues started arising. The lesson content was alright, but I felt it could be improved in many ways. I was teaching two basic classes, speaking/reading and writing. The speaking/reading classes were a breeze, and the lessons went pretty well. The only issue I had with them was that many of the students would listen for key words, find the the key words in the book and then just read the sentence with the key word out loud with out thinking about or understanding the question. Personally, I wanted the students to read their stories, understand them and be able to discuss them. So, I started having students close their books after reading them when we discussed them in order to break them of the habit of just reading random sentences aloud.

In the writing classes there was a whole series of issues I had to tackle. I had many students with incredible vocabularies, great speaking skills and no understanding of basic grammar. While I'm fond of the communicative method, I also think that fundamentals of grammar are necessary when studying a second language, especially a second language with an entirely different grammatical structure from the native language. For example, I had students who knew words like onomatopoeia but couldn't conjugate to be.

So, in my writing classes, I produced some supplementary materials where the students had to practice writing basic verbs in sentences with different subjects. I thought that there wasn't much of a point in teaching students how to "show instead of tell" if they couldn't convey basic information like "He goes to the store."

The admin liked my ideas, but a few parents complained, and then they started scrutinizing all of my teaching techniques. Everything was suddenly too hard. I needed to just follow the lesson plans made by the experts at Reading Town. All of my classes were going swimmingly. My students were all very responsive. They retained most of the information I covered in class. Their test scores were all pretty decent, but the parents hated me. Or, rather one or two parents hated me and the administration was all over my ass because some parent who couldn't speak English thought she was an expert on teaching English. After a month or so of this, I decided that I was done with this bullshit and wanted to find a job where I had control over the content of my class. I gave my notice and agreed to remain until the six month mark.