Just a fun little thread about the little things that grind our gears, in the classroom.
Keep it fun, please. The first person to throw a tantrum will be subjected to ridicule.

You know what really grinds my gears?

Finding the perfect picture to paste in your PPT, pasting it, and finding
out it's set to 9999999999999 X 9999999999999 resolution.

Really? You can change the resolution and make it smaller. My gears are more ground by Waygook PPTs that have fuzzy, pixelated pictures in them that are too small and simply blown up by the user.

When my insane coteacher forgets the rules of a game she's played three times today and three times yesterday already. Like she just did.

when my teachers during volley ball expect me to stay in my section and do my job but then they are all over the place.  If they played their position and not the others, almost pushing people out of the way, then maybe we wouldn't be scored on as much!  Or how they try and tell me how to block but I haven't seen one person that is even tried it!

Pics with hyperlinks in a PPT. Click on the wrong place during a presentation..........oh, IE is opening, that's fun. Hold on a minute kids.  Oh, it won't close.  Hmmm, what's wrong with this thing? Ah, there we go.  Ok, kids, where were we? That's right... *click* ...oh  for ****s ***. No, no, don't worry kids, just be patient.  Yes Sumin, i know it's my fault. I shouldn't click there. I should know better shouldn't I?

That and the small size type, as mentioned above.  And the keep it simple comment. 

Hmm, what grinds my gears about PPTs...

- Tons and tons of bomb games in a single lesson thread. Think hard before uploading your Mario/Sonic/Gangnam Style/Sailor Moon/God knows what else bomb game to a thread that already has ten of them. Same goes for other PPT games.
- Blurry photos on a slide.
- Consecutive slides that has the same image, but different text (where the teacher hasn't discovered how to use animations)
- Roman Korean fonts (BatangChe, GulimChe, etc.). They look UGLY.
- PPTs that are simple flashcards thrown together in 10 minutes
- Teachers that post materials with no or poor instruction on how to use them.
- Misspellings in a PPT
- Posting yourself in a PPT and uploading it to Waygook. Why?
- Downloading a massive 30MB PPT, only to discover that it's made up of a few extremely high resolution JPEGs and little else.
- Slides that have Korean translations written by the NET. Here's a hint: Your poorly misspelled Korean confuses students and adds NOTHING to L2 acquisition.
- PPTs that synchronize with a song. Wrong tool for the job. Try subtitle software for videos or karaoke software for MP3 files.


And unrelated

-Posting Youtube links for videos. The videos themselves are great! But Youtube videos have notoriously poor lasting power. Some of them get pulled for copyright infringement. The video might get removed. The account holder might get banned. Download the video and post it as MP4. Most of them should be small enough to attach to waygook

Pics with hyperlinks in a PPT. Click on the wrong place during a presentation..........oh, IE is opening, that's fun. Hold on a minute kids.  Oh, it won't close.  Hmmm, what's wrong with this thing? Ah, there we go.  Ok, kids, where were we? That's right... *click* ...oh  for ****s ***. No, no, don't worry kids, just be patient.  Yes Sumin, i know it's my fault. I shouldn't click there. I should know better shouldn't I?

That and the small size type, as mentioned above.  And the keep it simple comment.

Click on the forward arrow of the keyboard instead?

Quote from: druzzrug on September 04, 2014, 10:43:04 AM

When I have to simplify (I mean like really, really stupidly; so much that it's not even fun for the kids anymore) an activity or game...so that a co-teacher can understand how it works    *The kids have no problem understanding how it works, and even if I explain to this co-teacher IN KOREAN before class, they still don't get it..

OMG, YES!  I tried an activity/game once that involved figuring out how to say large numbers.  My co- was all, "....I think we should go back to the textbook now, because the students are confused and getting bored."  I had been checking the student's progress the whole time, and--with the exception of one student on one question--they were getting it just fine, and they seemed fairly well engaged.  My guess is that the co- didn't get it and was either bored (since they didn't get it) or embarrassed at not understanding.  It was frustrating.   

I think that the case is usually that one student (most likely one who doesn't know any English) will complain about something being difficult or boring and the coteacher just generalizes it as being true for the class as a whole.

I've never personally heard about the English budget being a waste, but I can totally believe it's a conversation that happens a lot, so in that spirit, the English budget is a waste but spending money on overnight fellowship drinking trip are an AWESOME use of funds because I know that some schools have an English budget but shift elsewhere instead, yes I am looking at you soju...lol.

I completely agree with the checking, we should definitely be checking before we use but...as for other issues I contribute tons, so occasionally (as this is a teaching materials sharing site) I need a break and would like to download a useful ppt and I get annoyed when there are either tons of errors or it is so simple (no effort at all put into it) that I could've saved the space on my hard drive (that I used to download it) for my own creation. If a powerpoint is just an unformatted ppt with one vocab word and a picture (on each slide) and no color or anything and it's for Grade 5 or higher...that's not useful.

Threads full of people complaining about PPTs because they don't work right (insert reason here) when they downloaded it without double checking or modifying; they themselves didn't even make it, yet alone prepare anything themselves for a lesson.....

Listing to Korean Staff complain about how the English budget is a waste of money, yet watch the school waste hundreds of dollars on 'projects' 'school stuff' 'janitors and maintenance men who can't do their job' the list goes on.

Listen to any complaint about how Korean staff have it soooo much harder......

Yes this too.

The idea that education should revolve around the students being happy and not the students coming to class to learn..... and behave GASP!

It's actually why a lot of Korean teachers are also complaining and new teachers quitting after the first couple years.