Teachers, School Memories: Level 2 English Listening 2.8

Somewhere in this recording, a classroom gets divided in half: "Right boys – go over here, you’re going to make a spaceship. Girls – go over there and saw that piece of wood in half." That's how one of our speakers remembers her metalwork lessons. A few minutes earlier, geography is described as "wading through really boring textbooks about rainfall" — and yet for someone else in the same conversation, geography was the subject that made the world make sense. Same subjects, opposite memories.

What you'll hear in this episode

The episode is built in three parts. First, three short monologues in which Mike, Tom and Nicholas each describe a good experience from school or university — a graduation ceremony, an anthropology degree that covered slavery and east Africa and a project on dance music, and, for one speaker, the friendships and the discovery that he could work hard after all.

Then the same three describe a bad experience. One remembers being the boy at the back thinking "I don’t care about history, I don’t care about math, because I want to sell cars", and calls his worst experience "not being allowed...to excel at what I was passionate about". Another describes a private school with lessons on Saturdays and compulsory rugby in the snow with almost no clothing. The third answers as a teacher rather than a student: when students drop his class, he wonders "Have I failed them?"

The last section is a real conversation between Katie and Mike about memorable teachers. Mike can't recall his geography teacher's name — "Forgive me but it's thirty years ago" — and Katie teases him: "Showing your age now..." They agree that good teachers "don’t just spoon feed you. They make you think." It ends with a shrug and a laugh: "to be continued".

Quick facts

Episode	Zapp! English Listening 2.8 - Education & Learning
Episode number	2.8
Pack	Listening 2
Level	2
Duration	13 minutes 32 seconds
Workbook	Included in the all-in-one pack (€39)

What you'll learn

The skill being practised here is listening for the general idea — not catching every word, but working out what someone's point is. The tasks ask you to compare: do the three speakers give the same reason? Why is the third bad experience different from the other two? You can answer both without understanding every detail, which is exactly the point.

There's also a lot to notice about how spontaneous speech is built. The monologues are full of pauses mid-sentence, restarts and thinking noises — "erm", "I guess", "you know" — and the conversation between Katie and Mike is full of overlap, with Katie saying "Yeah" and "Mmm" constantly to keep him talking. That backchannelling is normal English, and hearing it helps you do it yourself.

Watch too for how disagreement is softened. When Katie suggests some subjects are simply dull, Mike doesn't contradict her flatly; he says "it’s a fair point but I still think..." before making his case. And notice "rubbed off on us as well" — a phrasal verb doing work that a single formal word couldn't.

Vocabulary from the workbook

The glossary covers words as they're actually used in the recording:

slaves (noun) – people who are taken and made to work for nothing and are not free — from the anthropology monologue
dedicating (verb) – to use your time and energy to achieve what you want
excel (verb) – do very well at something — used twice by the same speaker
encouraged (verb) – make someone feel that they can do something or help them to feel that they can succeed
exploit (verb) – use in a way that you get good results — "exploit their own...passions"
relevant (adjective) – connected or important to a particular situation or person
contagious (adjective) – easily and quickly passed from person to person — said of a teacher's energy
enthusiasm (noun) – the feeling of being really excited about or interested in something

What's in the workbook

The workbook takes you through three listening tasks, each with a question set before you listen and an answer key afterwards, so you always know what you were supposed to catch. Task 1 asks whether anybody gives the same example of a good experience; Task 2 asks why the last bad experience is different; Task 3 asks you to think about your own favourite teachers first, then check whether the same reasons come up in the conversation.

After that come the Extra Materials: additional listening questions (which of a hat, music, food and friendship are mentioned, and why; whether school in Oxford meant Saturdays off; whether Katie liked geography and sport), plus a guessing-from-context exercise where you decide the word class of five bold items — graduation ceremony, fascinating, drop, rubbed off, massive — and match them to definitions. The full transcript is there for checking, and the glossary above closes the unit.

The workbook for this episode comes with the all-in-one pack, which covers every episode across the series.

Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39

Common questions

Is the audio scripted?

The conversations and monologues are unscripted — that's why you'll hear people forget names and lose their thread. The teaching sections that set up the tasks and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.

What level is this?

Level 2, from the Listening 2 pack. It runs 13 minutes 32 seconds.

Do I need the workbook?

You can listen for free without it. The workbook adds the task questions, the answer keys, the vocabulary exercises and the transcript.

Should I read the transcript while I listen?

Try the tasks first without it. The tasks only need the general idea. Use the transcript afterwards to see what you missed.

How do I get the workbook?

It's part of the €39 all-in-one pack, along with the workbooks for every other episode.

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