EES Algeria

02/01/2025

01/01/2025

We're ready to expand! Our school is entering a new stage, and we’re looking for teachers to join us!

01/01/2025

We're ready to expand! Our school is entering a new stage, and we’re looking for teachers to join us in helping teenagers practice their English and build confidence in speaking.

If you're ready to inspire and engage students in a dynamic learning environment, let’s work together!

21/12/2024

New Zealand man, Nigel Richards, won the French Scrabble championship, despite not being able to speak French. Instead he memorized the entire French
dictionary. He still cannot speak French.

Nigel Richards' story is fascinating, but it also sheds light on a common misconception about language learning. Many beginners believe that learning one word a day—or memorizing hundreds of words from a dictionary—will lead to fluency. While vocabulary is essential, language is far more than a collection of words; it’s about how those words come together in meaningful ways, in real-life contexts.

For a learner aiming to use English in professional or academic settings, fluency requires:

Contextual Understanding: Knowing how and when to use words appropriately in conversation or writing. This means focusing on phrases, collocations, and idiomatic expressions rather than isolated vocabulary.
Active Practice: Engaging in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Immersion in real-world situations (e.g., discussions, workplace simulations, academic texts) is key.
Cultural Competence: Language is deeply tied to culture. Understanding cultural norms and nuances enhances communication, especially in international settings.
Grammar and Structure: Beyond words, fluency involves mastering sentence construction, verb tenses, and other grammatical rules.

Memorizing one word a day may seem like progress, but it’s an incomplete and inefficient method for someone preparing to study, work, or teach in English. Instead, building habits like reading authentic materials, practicing with native speakers, and immersing oneself in the language will lead to deeper and more practical fluency.

What’s your language-learning strategy? Is it helping you achieve your goals? Share your thoughts below!

29/10/2024

“The source said you need to wait for a year before you can talk about potential energy”
“I was thinking about my own potential as a teenager”
“Your potential is to reach the end of the railway track traced by the source”
“But I cannot know what my potential is if I don’t challenge myself. Then who traces these railway track and decides on the shape of the molds where I and all the teenagers of my generation need to be put?
Who makes the molds? Who made the one mold used to make the molds?”
“Are you questioning the authority? The way you talk suggests that you have been exposed to external knowledge. Now, you will be unplugged from the source...”
“What? Maybe that’s good news”
“You need reeducation”
“Real education?”
“You need reeducation, so you will be sent down to the abyss of teenagers with polluted minds”

19/10/2024

I have trained myself in critical thinking and learned to think for myself.

I would like to see this mindset in every teenager I interact with, but telling them they must struggle to gain this independence is self-defeating.

I can't force anyone to be free because that takes away that freedom. So, I can only show them how I do it for myself and serve as a role model.

Consider a martial artist you want to instruct you to become a fighter yourself and think of how absurd it would be if he wanted to have actual combat with you where you have no right to defend yourself.

The master can defend himself, and that’s an ability you must acquire, so being beaten up defeats the purpose of becoming a stronger fighter.

In light of this example of self-defense, let's ponder more about what independent thinking should be and how it is understood by many individuals and groups.

Imagine someone in a long conversation saying: "You need to think for yourself and break free from those institutions that have been brainwashing you. Follow me, and I will show you how to think."

Many manipulators say this, and many victims fall into this trap and start imitating their manipulators in how they defend specific ideas; then, they call anyone with a different view "indoctrinated."

The actual indoctrination is what was done to the victim of this manipulation.

Every time someone instructs a group of people to ditch every source of information except for one source, that's manipulative and insidious, and that is how indoctrination starts.

Parents shouldn't lead their children to a closed-minded lifestyle, but we often see parents who are too restrictive about sources and resources for their children.

Furthermore, some of them have an unbalanced approach, completely blocking one side and not the other.

For example, that could be a parent who lets the doors of mind shaping wide open to movie studios, the music industry, social media networks where people can conceal their real identity, massively multiplayer online games where they pay real money for virtual goods, and TV programs designed to implant wickedness.

The same parent who permits all of those and their combination would prevent the child from being in proximity of intellectuals within their local community, forbid the child from going to the gym or the dojo, having art or cookery class, taking driving lessons when they are in the age to, or joining a speaking club to practice a foreign language they like.

This contradiction between what is allowed and what is not can be falsely justified. If we look at the activities we see that all those that are permitted can be done at home whereas all those that are denied to the child take place outside.

So what happens in the mind of the parent is that their protective instincts perceive those activities in the first category as safe.
That false sense of security comes from the fact that the child is not physically interacted with. But is that the only aspect of the child’s safety that should matter?

Then, the pretext given by this parent would be that the learning that occurs when the child is engaged in those activities of the second category would make the “main and most important source of knowledge” less effective…

No, if your child wants to learn how to draw like their favorite cartoonist, that will not make them a less performant learner.

Also, why should there be a “main and most important source of knowledge” in the first place, and why learning has to be retrained, restricted, limited, formatted, conforming to patterns, following models, advancing on a railway track where there is no second dimension?

Learning about any subject will not harm you in any way as far as you are not taking harmful action, and it will not hinder your learning in general, jeopardize your study plan, or make you less likely to succeed in life.

Only your actions can hurt you or harm the people around you, not the knowledge itself. For example, knowing that hydrochloric acid is corrosive does not hurt you. Doping it on your skin is nocive.

I will not deny that there are books that are harmful in their very nature, so it is legit to avoid them altogether, but those are drops of black ink in oceans of resources.
,
So do not be afraid to learn. Do not fear knowledge.

12/10/2024

Hello all,
We need English language teachers for a particular
grading task. We want to determine the most diligent learner in the group.
Out of six, one learner will be granted a scholarship.

So first, who are the learners?

These are the ones we selected to participate in summer grammar camp. They had 36 hours of class, and at the end, they were given a written evaluation.

On which basis can teachers assess our learners?

Only their teacher knows how each of them behaved in class and how they contributed to the camp's collaborative learning. External teachers can judge only on the basis of the papers they handed in at the end of their last session.

How can we eliminate personal blouses and make the selection fair?

Teachers who want to examine the six papers and pick the best one will be looking at copies of the answer sheets rather than the originals. They will see only the student's number but not the name.

09/10/2024

I am trying to change how English is taught in Algeria. At least in my immediate environment, since I cannot influence an entire country at once.