OK, I've read dozens of help-me-with-my-assignment threads here, so now it's your turn!
I've been asked to find out about kids aged 5-12, which none of you are, but some of you are only 13 or 14 and some of you are parents of kids, and can let me know about their experiences. (Please!)

I'm specifically looking at English as a foreign/additional language classes, but any insights about what it's like to be a kid in school would help!

Did you feel like you were feeling your way in the dark with no clue about whether you rocked or svcked at the subject?
Were test results always a shock to you?
Did you feel like they didn't give you enough information on how to improve?
Did you use any apps?
Did your school use any cool gadgets?

Basically, what was it like?

Much appreciated, you rock, I love you!

I'm not sure if this pertains to this subject, but it's the only thing I can think of. When my daughter was in high school she told me one evening that her math teacher got taken away by the police. When I asked her why she said that a boy next to her kept taunting him until he went berserk, leaped over the kid's desk and choked him. The kid then ran out of the room and a few minutes later the cops showed up and took him away. That's math class though, not really what you were asking for.

When I was in high school,(I'm 49) we had a drop down gorgeous goddess of an English teacher. To this day I remember all of us guys ignoring the academic material and admiring her while the girls were taking down notes.

When I was at school, I distinctly remember seeing a man, who I have always presumed to have been a teacher, being lead away in handcuffs by two policeman towards a waiting

police car. Nobody at the school thought it worthy of comment.

I am 55, when I was at school the most modern thing we had was a white board. We did however have a Phillips video-recorder.

Nothing really. I got lucky and had a few actual smart teachers who knows how stupid the world is, and was pretty direct with things.

I like your sig Binky.

"If I told you once, I told you a million times, DON'T PROVOKE THE BORG!"

I had good English teachers for the most part. So there isn't anything really that I could say I wish I was taught. And I'm not a parent, so I can't say anything about any experiences from that perspective. Also, I was--and still am--really good at spelling. And I don't want that to sound like "Hey, look at me, I'm smart!" It's just been one of my strong suits (now something like chemistry I'm absolutely terrible at).

However, there are some grammatical/spelling mistakes that I see often that really grate on me. The biggest one is probably whenever people write/type could of/would of/should of. IT'S COULD HAVE/WOULD HAVE/SHOULD HAVE, JUST LOOK AT THE CONTRACTIONS BECAUSE THEY END IN "'VE." Sorry, that one really gets on my nerves.

I don't know what really young kids like 5-12 years old use these days, but I would think a good old-fashioned whiteboard is servicable. I remember back when I was really young those projectors that used a lamp to display those laminated sheets were in a lot of classrooms still (not the projectors that are hooked up and can display stuff from computers).

Kids learn in different ways, so you may have to work slightly differently with each kid. But an important thing is to not teach kids simple memorization. When I was learning some Spanish in high school, this was somewhat of an issue. Yeah, I could remember certain words for the rest of the year, but later on I'd just forget a bunch of stuff. You have to teach kids the basic grammar rules too, and why things are the way they are. When I did Spanish in college my teachers were more effective in teaching me because I was taught more about why words were the way they were as opposed to how they were, especially in Spanish II when my teacher would sometimes talk about the roots of the Spanish words and how some of them related to their English counterparts. When it came to vocabulary, there was also much more effective groupings to study, such as things that dealt specifically with hospitals/healthcare, banking, sports, food, etc. (Which reminds me, I've really been slacking on my Spanish practice ever since I graduated from my university...) Anyways, doing a similar thing with English ought to help.

lolwhiteboards. Blackboards were perfectly serviceable when I was at school and also had the advantage that the chalk could be washed off periodically: every whiteboard I've seen (which were all in boring meeting rooms at work) were always smudged with the ghosts of writing that was more indelible than advertised. I do remember when the rolling blackboard was a new thing so teachers could write complicated things on the unseen parts before lessons, much to other teachers' irritation.

I also remember slates being used in class, though they were restricted to kids who kept on breaking their pencils. Which I think all of us did occasionally so we had an excuse to use the mechanical pencil sharpener. By "use" I obviously mean "to grind away the pencil in its entirety."

Blackboards! How could I forget about those? The good ol' days of chalk and screeching whenever somebody ran their fingernails across the board (which never actually bothered me that much, but for some people it did). Good point on the whiteboards, it was kind of annoying to see previously written stuff still appear faded whenever you tried to erase it. And ditto on the grinding away the pencil with the sharpener, haha.

Uh, why do you think their saying would of instead of would've, it's almost phonetically the same? should they be pronouncing it should ev? or should va?

I remember an English teacher really anol about this, though it was always about writing it out, not actually saying it. it's not like double negatives.

hah I wish my English teacher was upfront and just stated they were milking the tenure and most of the pedantic stuff has little real world value.

Yeah, I meant when they write it, not say it. I will go edit that.

My first English teacher taught me how to put together a sentence, and then how to take it apart again.

The second gave the class that I was in, The God Beneath the Sea to read.

My third and last gave me The History of Mr Polly and Macbeth to contend with. She also gave us Thomas, Owen and

Yates. We left out Auden. The intention was to study a poet from each of the constituent countries of Great Britain.

I will not comment further. But try and track down Richard Burton reading Under Milkwood.

I think I would have liked more poetry.

I honestly cannot say because I coasted through English class without really trying and still got 9's and 10's and got 98 points out of 100 in my matriculation exam. I filled in exercises and handed them in before class ended so I never had much homework and read at a fairly high level for my personal enjoyment so when we had to read a book I usually just went for whatever I was already reading at the time.

I do have to mention that despite no-one in my family or close circle of friends speaking English casually, I still somehow picked up the language two years before I began receiving a formal education in it at school so that by the point I had my first English class I was already almost fluent.

In fact, in upper-secondary school I had a much harder time of my first language and my second domestic language than English because of their classes much heavier emphasis on literary anolysis and maddeningly complex grammar respectively.

I wish my teachers made a bigger point of making sure I only use words I know for sure what they mean. I've had a few times now when I learned, that word does not mean what I thought it meant. Although, some of those times are due to ignorance of culture more than lack of grasp of English.