Hi to all Teaching English readers,

This is my first blog post, which I hope by the title and the content itself will keep you reading my future blog posts!

While in the process of thinking what to say in this post and how to put pen to paper to express my strong ideas on this topic, I decided to make the title as self-explanatory as it could be. As a novice in the field of ELT (with four whole years of teaching English experience, and at the beginning of year five), one of the most noticeable features (that I have always been searching for other teachers' experiences) is the teacher-student relationship in the classroom, or in ELT terms, 'rapport'. Looking up the word 'rapport' in an English dictionary, I found that it meant 'a relation marked by harmony, conformity, accord, or affinity.' Having this in mind, I tried at the beginning of my teaching days (in my case, this example is taken from an academic setting - English major students) to implement this definition in the classroom itself, and what I unfortunately received was students (only several years younger than me) calling out my name in class instead of the more appropriate 'Teacher' or 'Professor'. After several such experiences, I sat down long and hard to reconsider my perhaps too mild, or lenient, approach to them. Being objective, it is totally alright to call out a student by their name or even to use the second person singular pronoun (which differs from the second person plural pronoun in Macedonian, but their difference is the same as in English), while having them call out my first name when asking a question, was certainly not something I took particular pride in!

The next year I took a 'lump' more strict approach towards them (by skipping the 10-minute breaks, or starting off Monday mornings with difficult grammar activities), and by the end of the school year, in the anonymous questionnaires that I handed out to them they turned me into an ogre due to my severe and scrupulous standards in the classroom! Being inexperienced at that point, I thought then that I at least fulfilled my expectations regarding my name-calling, yet only afterwards did I realize that my teaching methods should not be all about that! In the process of making them more aware of my teacher status in the classroom, I simply forgot about what teaching really is about!

About a year or so was needed for me to realize that being a teacher in the real sense of the word implies more than the eye meets, and especially more than the mere 'outer package'. In the meantime I learned the tactics of the element of surprise in the ELT classroom, and how to handle many unplanned situations. In other words, I am aware that I still have a long way to go, nevertheless my experience and culture (not forgetting to mention the family I was raised in) has taught me the hard way how not only to be a professional but also a friend both in the framework of the limits of the classroom and beyond its walls (referring to the coffee breaks which I frequently spend chatting with my students, and the social networking website Facebook, which is going to be a future topic in my blog!).

So the issue that I am trying to raise and to get other fellow teachers to consider is whether it is realistically possible to manage to maintain a stable relationship with students (at any level of English language learning), which I will feel free to call 'friendship'. If you ask me, I will with certainty say that it is possible to achieve such a thing, and while this takes a lot of time to build up, it takes only a moment to be destroyed (by a wrong move on the teacher's side).

I would be pleased to hear your opinions and various experiences in your ELT classroom, and specific problems you have had to overcome!

Aneta Naumoska, Macedonia