Recently I’ve been using some clips from favourite tv shows in the classroom like Friends and The X-Files. Unfortunately parent power has raised its ugly head once more..

I work in a typical Korean hagwon where the Native Speaker Teacher (NST) teaches each class twice a week and traditionally, NSTs are meant to cover writing, speaking and also use a graded reader. I discovered that using readers in the classroom is an extremely time-consuming process! There are always a few students who will not read the set chapter or small section of the reader before class as they are meant to, and for whom any attempt at a short discussion or even a comprehension quiz is meaningless.

Also, although there are some very good readers out there, many are not interesting to our kids. The main thing though, is that to get through the reader at anything like a reasonable rate of progression, we had to read in class together because they simply did not have the time to do this at home. Routinely, 15-20 minutes of our lesson were spent on getting a group of overworked kids onto the same page…

So..I thought of an alternative way to provide my students with something to write/speak about, but I guess in the back of my mind, I knew it couldn’t last long.

The students loved it! I would show an episode of the X-Files, broken up into several short sections and after each section, we would have a discussion based on prepared questions and with focus on key vocabulary or structures. Of course I was careful to ensure that the episode used was not too scary but rather just intriguing given the young age of the students.

With Friends of course, many of the stories involve very adult themes, but certain episodes and sub-plots are innocently amusing and with careful pre-selection and in some cases judicious use of the fast forward button to cut out discussion on adult themes, can be very enjoyable!!

The first thing I noticed was the occasional appearance at the little window in my door of one of the desk staff who at first I thought was checking attendance figures as they regularly do.

Next were some seemingly inquisitive and innocuous questions from Korean managers about why I thought video clips were better than readers.

There was a meeting in which I explained that a lot of the graded readers on offer were not very interesting to students, or at best were hit and miss. I explained that I discussed the subject with students and only if there was unanimity, would we try this experiment. I reported that students were very enthusiastic.

At this point I do have to say that I can understand the concern. We can all imagine the scenario of a lazy teacher, going into his class, hitting the play button and opting out of the teaching process. Also, it isn’t difficult to choose sure-fire winners like these two examples where students are more or less guaranteed to be hooked on characters like Mulder, Chandler and Phoebe.

But I was foolish enough to hope that I was trusted…

Today I was informed that some parents had got wind of the new teacher’s new methods and didn’t approve. Now I will have to inform some very disappointed students that Fox Mulder and Joey Tribbiani have to go, and it’s back to Alice in Wonderland…