May 2005 Archives

Unable to sleep, I spent some time reading through British teachers' blogs last night and was reminded of just what dire straits some areas of education in the UK are in. Two in particular stood out, for different reasons. One, a blog dedicated to exposing the worse side of the ESL profession in the UK, gave details of the worst job it had seen advertised this year, while the other documented the travails of a highly dedicated teacher who has finally resigned and decided to quit the profession.

I came across a rather bizarre explanation of uncountable nouns on an ESL website specialising in grammatical explanations:

In English, Uncountable nouns only used in the singular tense.

I looked at a few other pages and saw a number of basic grammatical errors. In a page about word order with adjectives and verbs, the following sentences were used:

My mother lost her keys.
The boys play ball all the time.

The words in italics are the ones the site had highlighted (accessed on the 15th May 2005) as the adjectives in the sentences.