Posters have spoken against demo lessons. They said:

Demo lessons are useless and a total waste of time.

Demo lessons do not serve any useful purpose.

They are ridiculous and unnecessary.

The lessons are evaluated by unqualified assessors.

Demo lessons are crap.

What a waste of time, money and effort! Rubbish!

You are the only poster who strongly defended demo lessons. You said: “I don't think that demo classes are a bad idea at all! If I was recruiting a teacher, I'd like to see what they can do in a classroom before I set them on my students!”

It seems you did not understand me when I told you to go and learn this very important principle: “Good intentions do not justify a bad action.” I did not explain how this was applicable to demo lessons. You misconstrued me and called me a “pompous” person instead (you know three fingers point back at you).

There are so many examples of this principle in real-life situations, but I will give you only one example.

A couple came home in the middle of the night and suddenly heard someone shout “Boo!”. The man shot and killed the ‘intruder.’ He found he had shot and killed his beloved daughter, whose last words to his father were: “I love you, Daddy.”

This sad example tells us that "good intentions aren't always good."

I have already told you: “You have good intentions for supporting demo lessons but good intentions are not always good.” I will now explain why it is so.

A good teacher may not mind giving a demo lesson in front of the people evaluating him but it is not fair to him as he is not giving the lesson in a real class situation. The evaluators are adults and cannot behave and imitate real students in class. The teacher will not get the same kind of reactions he can get from teaching a real class. You say: “I'd like to see what they can do in a classroom before I set them on my students!” What a load of bunk! How can you see what he can do in a classroom if he is not given a real class to teach in the first place?

Take the case of YoungEnglishman, or any new teacher for that matter. If he were to give a demo class before he joined the training center, the evaluators would never know of his difficulties in dealing with kids (his post tells us he had such difficulties). In the demo lesson, the evaluators themselves can never act like real kids – like kids crying in class (YoungEnglishman did not know what to do with a crying kid), feeling restless and walking about in class, talking, and urinating on the floor (we should know some kids have urinary incontinence), etc. How will a teacher deal with the children in such situations? Will the evaluators do any of those things during a demo lesson? Obviously, they can’t but these things do happen in a real children’s class. Will one of the evaluators urinate on the floor during the demo lesson and see how the teacher will deal with the situation? (Yea, you have to make it real.) So demo lessons can never give a true picture of how a teacher will react or deal with problematic students.

The evaluators may pass the teacher after the demo lesson, but it is ultimately the students (the adult students) who decide whether they want that teacher to teach them or not. Some companies send their employees for English lessons and pay a large sum of money to the training centers. You are from London, and what if the adult students don’t like British or Cockney accent?

If the company prefers its employees to hear American accent, it will tell your center to get an American to teach the class. If your center refused to listen, the company will pull its employees out of the center. Do you think your company will want to lose money that way? No way, your center will accede to the company’s request. As I have said before, students come first, not teachers (foxy agreed and gave a good comment on that point). I don’t know whether this had happened to your center, but I know of a company that requested a training center to provide an American teacher to teach its employees. At the end of the day, it is not the demo lessons but the companies, adult students or parents who decide whether they want that particular teacher or not. You could feel bad that the class was taken away from you just because they did not like your accent.

From his post, it could be seen YoungEnglishman did not have the gift or the natural aptitude for teaching young children. Not every teacher has this gift. If the evaluators themselves don’t have the gift or aptitude, how on earth will they be able to assess a teacher and know for sure he or she has it? It needs an experienced child education psychologist to find out for the center whether a teacher has this gift. You are no child psychologist and so cannot assess a teacher accurately. And training centers can ill afford to hire such psychologists.

Evaluators may be influenced by an evaluator who has a strong personality or is strong-minded. What if the evaluator happened to be the most senior among them? They tend to listen to that evaluator for his senority lends weight to what he says. In this way, demo lessons cannot be fair and objective, even if it is given in a real-class situation.

My post is getting lengthy. I have other points to prove your argument for demo lessons is flawed. No matter how, your good intentions for demo lessons aren’t always good or right. Your good intentions can never justify demo lessons. I have said that the more you justify (demo lessons) the more you make a fool of yourself.

You will not like my next posting.