As most of you guys know, the teachers in BC are on strike for the first week of the 2014-2015 school year. It's a big problem for the Canadian kids, and it's a big problem for the high school international students too. Since the international student paid more than thirteen thousands a year, the Victoria International High School Program decided to send all the returning international students to a language school call Inlingua.
As an international student in the School District of Greater Victoria, I was told to go to this language school on Sept. 2th. Because there are too many international students in Victoria, they separate the students into two groups, and each group will only have half day of classes. I was in the morning group and I would stay there from 8:30 am to 11:45 am.
The good thing was that the campus was in downtown Victoria, so it was easy to find. I had visited Inlingua before and it seemed like a good school. You know, the guy who were talking to me about their programs looks professional, and all the nice orange color of the wall made you feel like it was a little nice warm campus. The course we were going to take supposed to be an IELTS preparation course, and although I was not going to take any IELTS test, I supposed that to be a good course for my English study.
Well, when I get in to the campus I was scared. I felt like there were like hundreds of international students. Maybe not that much, but the campus was very small and it make me feel there were a lot of people. There were some tables on the wall to show which classroom you are supposed to go to. There were ten classrooms and there were twenty students per class.
My classroom was No.3, and the teacher is a lady in her thirty's. Lets's just call her Ms.M for now. Ms.M was pregnant for six months, you can tell from her shape. She introduced herself as an elementary school teacher. She said she never taught high school students before she came to Inlingua, and she came here because of the strike. Certainly, she needed to get paid. The funny thing is that she said she didn't really know a lot about the IELTS test before she came to the language school. That actually surprised me a lot since it was a IELTS preparation course.
Ms. M asked whether there were any students heard about the exam... Luckily for her, all of the students know more or less about IELTS and a Thai student even took one in the summer. She started to ask that student a lot of questions about IELTS, which I thought she should have known if she was teaching the course. She asked that student if she took any course before taking the exam. The student said yes she took a two week course. After a few while, Ms. M said to that student, "It will be a little boring for you since you took the course already." The Thai student corrected that she didn't take the course in Inlingua, but in a language school in Thailand. Then the teacher said, "Oh, it's like world wide."...
Another thing that surprised me is that Ms. M didn't really know about TOFEL either. A student was coming late, and Ms. M tried to told him what was going on. She asked him if he knew about IELTS. The guy said, "Yeah, it's similar to TOFEL." Then Ms. M looked confused and then that guy tried to explain to her what TOFEL was. Eventually she said, "Oh, okay, I don't really know about those different tests."...
It was fine that she didn't know things about IELTS as long as she could give us a good English class. However, she spent half of the morning copying a chart about IELTS to the white board and asking all the students to copy that down. I mean, she could just photocopy the chart and hand that to all the students...
It was a really funny first day of school anyway.