Weekend Update

A combination of factors have affected my ability to post here over the last week or so. First, the internet in our apartment went down last week Saturday and did not start working again until Tuesday. Then, Megan and I became busy with lesson planning for our classes and doing the actual teaching. Finally, I have on 3 occasions tried to post a 2-minute video of our apartment here but even after waiting 15-20 hours for it to upload it has not worked. Unless I figure out a solution to that problem I probably won't be putting up video here anytime soon.

But now I have some time so I thought I'd update. Last week Saturday Megan and I received our schedules and they were lighter than we expected. I am teaching 12 hours and Megan is teaching 10. We both have Wednesdays off, so we can lesson plan and grade for the second half of the week at that time. So far it has gone pretty well, but it is difficult to come up with enough activities to fill 2 hours, especially when students are hesitant to participate.

My first class I decided to introduce myself to the students by playing a game. I broke the classes up into four teams and then I would show a question about myself on the powerpoint. After each team gave an answer to the question I would click to the next slide which would reveal the answer. I do not think I have ever seen such pure joy from students in a classroom than when I would reveal an answer. They loved the competition of it and also liked to learn about me (where I've lived, my family, my hobbies, etc). It was a success. 

The second class I decided I should actually start teaching something. I referenced a textbook that Megan and I had bought to come up with some activities and a grammar point to teach. The activities went fairly well. I had the students prepare a dialogue using the grammar pattern I taught and then asked some of them to share their dialogues. They did pretty well, although their spoken English is still very weak and they basically had to read what they had written on their sheets verbatim.

I suspected the grammar I taught them was too easy since grammar is the one thing the students do have a very strong grasp of, yet it was impossible to tell because the students are so unresponsive to questions that I don't know if they do not understand or if they are just shy. Well, I guess they are just shy because I did get an email from a student (Subject line: "hello,my dear teacher") that said the grammar was too easy and that they needed practice speaking.

I was glad someone was brave enough to tell me this because I would have continued to do the same things I had been doing. Now I just need to figure out how to get them to speak in English.

Here are some of my students responses when I asked them to write what they liked and disliked about their English class last semester and what they think might be the most useful activities to teach them English:

• "I dislike examination. It give me strain."
• "The most useful activities is gives us more free time."
• "The most useful activities, I think, is more choice to speak in english and debate in english. The reason is so simple that everyone knows it."
• "Playing game is the most useful activities. Because I can learn English with a happy way."
• "Activities: talking about something wonderful in English."
• "Useful activity: Interactive teaching, because it can move our positiveness."
• "I dislike exams, I think exams have no sense."