Careering

It is difficult to reflect on my career because I have never really had a career.  Mostly, I have been planning for a career.  Of the past 27 years I have been a full time student for something like 25 of them.  My university education, which included undergrad, grad and doctorate studies, occupied something like ten or twelve years.  That was a long time without a real job (but with a lot of hard work) and little money.  And making a radical transition to a different field in a different country means that most of the education and social capital I built up counts for nothing and is effectively useless. 

Although I am now employed at a university, a long time goal, it feels much more like my career is just beginning.  The hiring process and contract situation we face in Korea makes university employment more like a short term gig than a lifetime career.  The workplace has a high turnover and doesn’t seem to even offer raises from contract to contract.  I am not tenure track, don’t have a long term contract, and am not at a university that affords much opportunity for advancement in terms of teaching or administrative positions.  I still view my position as tenuous and temporary and always expect the whole thing to disappear tomorrow as part of some bureaucratic change in rules or economic restructuring.  As such it makes it difficult to consider this has a career. 

Part of this comes from the marginal position I occupy in Korean society.  Although many Westerners love to adopt the moniker “ex-pat” we are all just immigrant labor, useful so long as we are cheap and disposable.  This is especially true in the hagwons where they just grind up and shit on the teachers who must employers know have very little recourse or alternative.  The uni isn’t as bad at the hagwon, but the power imbalance remains tilted very heavily.

Otherwise, I enjoy living in Korea and don’t find getting by in daily life to be any different from USA.  I didn’t have social responsibilities or obligations there, and as an outsider I am free from them here as well.  I also find Korea to be very comfortable and accessible and easy to adapt to.  I found Seattle to be far more marginalizing and alienating, so Seoul is actually a big step up.  It is a lot easier to meet like minded interesting people, the pace of life and weather is more like what I am used to and the social customs, while different, don’t feel foreign or uncomfortable.  There is a lot of life in a dynamic, increasingly cosmopolitan city like Seoul that is welcoming and enjoyable.

Tiring Week

This week was short but was fraught with struggle.  After the long weekend  most of the students were really disengaged and it was difficult to get them into classroom interaction.  Most of the kids were mentally somewhere else and a few were just sleepwalking.  There were a couple of students I had to send out of the class for sleeping.

Tuesday was the really tough one.  Everyone knows things are almost over.  We are near the end of the book.  The weather is amazing and there are tons of activities around campus that are a bit distracting.  No one is interested in the work that has to be done in the book - least of all me.

I was able to correct most of this in the later part of the week when I turned most of the work over to the students.  I lengthened the warm up to include interaction with 5 other students.  I made the students stand and actually walk around the classroom.  It seemed to help, it put a lot more energy into the class.  I also had the students do more peer correction and gave less feedback and teacher talk.  The book exercises were kept to a minimum and students were responsible for asking other for the correct answer.

All this made class more interesting and kept students engaged and productive.  I was able to sneak in some impromptu pronunciation lessons and some important grammar forms.  I think things worked out, but on paper we did very little.  The good news is that we are on schedule and will have enough time to complete the book and let the students speak a lot.

Consensus Building: Triumphs and a Failure

This week, coincidentally, I finished up a cooperative exercise that was started last week.  It is an exercise that I developed last semester and have been refining every time I run it.  It usually works well at developing negotiation and consensus building, but this semester one group made a real mess of it.

I think I have previously mentioned here that I have to do a chapter on marriage.  I hate this chapter because I know nothing about marriage and my students aren’t even dating (there are a few campus couples now – so cute! – but that is the extent to which they know anything about relationships) so this chapter is especially worthless.  Also, everything in NorthStar is so fucking negative.  The whole chapter is about creating a prenup and developing norms associate with how important it is to have a prenup and readings and listening exercises about divorce and adultery.  All very important language for their future, I suppose. 

My solution has been to use two negotiating GW sessions that use vocab and require consensus building.  In the first exercise, I split the students into groups of three or four students and have them create a prenup.  The twist is that the group is itself a husband or wife (or are lawyers representing a husband or wife, if that is easier for them to conceptualize it) and they have to draft rules they want to be followed when they are married.  It is basic stuff -  who will work, can they smoke, who will do chores, etc.  – plus some of the nonsense they get from the book and my own weird shit that I think is funny and good to them to talk.  What is really fun to do in this exercise is subvert the expected norms.  I have groups of boys be a wife, and a group of girls acts as their husband.  Some of the students are pretty goofy about this and make humorous entries, but I don’t mind.  In this phase I only really care about them working as a group, getting everyone involved, and producing as a consensus driven group.  

The second part is a bit trickier.  Once the groups have come up with the rules they would like to impose on the other spouse, I have them negotiate with their spouse to create a single prenuptial agreement that both sides agree on.  I make the task clear: they have to come to an agreement and make one set of rules they all agree to follow.  If they do that they get married and leave happily ever after. After that I do some modeling for the class by negotiating problems in different ways.  I show them some ways to compromise, some ways to engage in horse trading, what a real impasse is and some ways to deal with problems.  Getting started can be difficult and I find I have to give a lot of initial guidance and support.  I find it works best if I work with each group and walk them through the first problem, show the problem and ways they can compromise, and then have everyone cheer and get them to work together on the next problem.  Often the students’ problems seem to be related to negotiating and critical thinking rather than language, but they adapt quickly.  Sometimes I will be helping one group and I’ll hear another group cheer – it’s a great sign to know they are working together to overcome a problem and succeeding.  It is also good to see that the groups change overtime as they work through problems.  And the gendering seems to get them to thing about aspects of fairness in their own expectations from their notions of what marriage should be like.

There have been some problems working with this.  In the past I had on one person from each group do the negotiating in front of the class.  That was fun, but too few students spoke.  I had them do it as a group, but the size was too big (4 and 4 makes 8 students trying to negotiate) to really get everyone involved.  Also, there were a lot of kids talking; it gets noisy and tough to move around and help everyone.  I need to make smaller groups in the future. 

But the real problem today was in the business class.  While most of the students were highly responsive to negotiating, a very important skill to have in English, there was one student who remained a jerk throughout.  This kid is just a selfish bully.  He is bigger, older and louder than the other kids and seems to have a higher place in the hierarchy and other boys go along with him.  Today he was just a turd in the punchbowl.  The rules he made for himself (the wife) were incredibly sexist and he refused to relent.  There was no negotiation, just badgering.  I appealed to him as a business student telling him thing of it as a contract for his company.  Would he want to take on all of the costs and none of the profit?  Yup.  Would he want a lawyer to treat him like this? Sure, this was his interest.  The girls in the group (who were the husband) were disgusted and pissed off.  My only recourse was to break the group into smaller parts and marginalize him.  He made the whole exercise a waste of time.  His group took the longest, didn’t complete the assignment and failed to create a consensus.  They were the only group to ever fail to reach an agreement and become married.  

This aspect of personality management is something I need to be more conscious of.  I should probably created groups instead of using the groups that existed, but that has its own costs since these students take all their classes together and already have strong bonds and quiet politics that I do not understand.  I’ll have to try something a little different next time.

Difficulties w/ New Lessons, Small Successes

This marks a new lesson I have been trying to construct for the class.  Previously the class had a second writing assignment after the midterm.  Last semester I spent a lot of time on that in the second half of the semester before working on preparation for the final.  This semester the school eliminated the second writing exam and added a comparison component to the final speaking exam.  In the final the students will now look at two pictures and describe what is the same and what is different.  This has been a new lesson that I have been trying to construct.

The problem for me is not that I lack foresight, but that I lack correct foresight.  I never seem to correctly anticipate the problems the students have, nor do I do things the right way.  I ran the exact same lesson 6 times this week and I feel that I only did it correctly the sixth time.  My plan was to do it step by step, using PPIPP and scaffolding to get the point where the students could produce on their own.  This generally did not work well until the final class.  I identified a few things I did wrong.  They needed more activation than I originally gave; I should have led the class there a bit more.  Some classes were able to pick up the basic form of sentences from my modeling, some could not.  Some of my examples were unclear in that I should have used pictures with more obvious or easily explained differences.  Some things were a little rushed.  Sometimes I expected a bit too much.    

The good news is that it went really well by the sixth time.  One the one hand this was due to a bit of trial and error and experience.  On the other hand, it was also due to paring the lesson down to the simplest and most basic level.  I need to recognize the difference between simple/complex and easy /difficult when making lessons.

Other good news is that by consistently writing “How do I say _______ in English?” on the WB and leaving it there the students have been using it a lot.  I hear them say it quite often, even when I am not near their desks.  I think this means they are using it to get a translation or clarification.  This is a minor success.  I have also started dragging more information out of students in warm ups.  They used to just give one word answers or bull shit platitudes  about what they have recently done.  Answers like “slept” or “studied English” were common responses to “what did you do last weekend?”  I have been starting class by talking for a while about something I have done, making has many sentences as I can, before asking them to talk to their partners.  I don’t think it is very important to talk about their weekends, but it is important to get them producing.  It has a noticeable impact in the class.  The more they say in the first 5 minutes, the more they tend to say in the next 70.  It usually gets them more engaged with their partners.  They tend to ask more questions, back channel and peer correct if they chat early.  Another small victory…

Teaching Vocabulary

This was a topic I was a bit worried about since I didn't think I taught any vocab in class.  I never do any activities like those shown in Harmer.  Usually I simply point out the words that students need to know for the class and leave it to them to memorize the meaning.  The book gives the meaning to all of the words through teach test mark type exercises.  Generally the meaning in found in the context of a reading exercise and the students use that to connect the word to the definition in some sort of word and meaning matching exercise or through sentence completion via fill in the blanks.   Even with these exercises I usually tell my students not to worry about infrequent and confusing idioms that have small applicability.   I always makes sure they all have the correct answer, but that is about as far as the lesson goes.

At least I thought so.  Nation points out how much more involved teaching vocabulary is.  After going over some of my lessons from today I noticed that although I don't spend much time on giving meaning, I do spend a lot of time on use and form.  I had never considered this to be a part of vocab. 

One lesson I have been working on this week was count vs noncount nouns.  A major part of the lesson was the use of some and any.  I had the students produce their own questions and statements about count and noncount nouns stressing the need for correct usage of some and any.  I tried to get in as many of the ways to remember previously learned words so I added an extra writing component to the activities today.  The task was that they had to come up with 5 sentences about things they had and 5 about things they did not have.  Once that was done they had to ask others if they had any of the items they needed.  This is something that I feel is practical and useful, and both some and any are common in English speech.  It made the students make a lot of connections and I think it largely avoided interference. 

In my other level I worked on  the pronunciation of can and can't.  A lot of them say them in a way that makes the two words indistinguishable.  I went over how can sounds more like the con in bacon and taught them the importance of stress on the word can't.  This was only spoken . 

Previously I would not have thought of these lessons and exercises as vocab, but now I know better.

Giving Directions

Again today the problem I had was dealing with the gap I faced in the lesson because of the dropped writing assignment.  Came up with a couple of activities that I thought would work pretty well.  I think they did work well, or rather that they would have worked really well had I not botched the directions.  I thought I had everything about the lesson figured out, but I made a lot of mistakes in giving the instructions.  This of course is a problem for me even with native English speakers.  I also realized that some of it is unanticipated problems that are best corrected with experience.  Still I need to work on making everything very clear and specific and to model things without ambiguities or changes (ex: I acted out a physical exchange of goods in an exercise where I wanted the students to only pretend to exchange goods.  This lead students to actually exchanging the things they should have only talked about.  I fixed it later.)

I also got walloped by a glaring cultural bias built into one of the text books.  In the chapter about marriage the first exercise is to discuss what is happening in the picture.  It shows a picture of a wedding in a church, with the the father and the bride standing before the door and all the people turning to look at them.  I only have a few problems with this chapter.  First, it has nothing to do with my life and second, it means nothing tho the students lives either.  I may have mentioned this before.  Today I can add to that the cultural bias as well.  First off, it is a western wedding, most of the kids don't know what happens at a western wedding.  Second, it is in a church.  Do people even do that anymore?  Is it still the prevailing norm?  It is sort of an outdated archetype.  The book is a bit vague about what it asks students:  "What is happening in this picture?"  and "What happens before you say 'I do'?"  Not very helpful stuff.  I had them turn it around and had them describe weddings in Korea/China (it is a mixed class)  and then we compared and contrasted the ceremonies in different countries.  That kinda worked out. 

Out of the book

A couple things went well today.  Got outside of the book, fleshed out my inductive/deductive approach a bit, managed a lot of student interaction and gave them a lot of PPIPP, was able to work with some of the weaker students one-on-one and only ended up a day behind.

The major success today was that I got outside of the book.  This is one thing I have been struggling with all semester and I finally made the space for myself.  Some of the book is being glossed over, some foisted on the students.  This is especially true with the vocabulary.  I have been going over the listening and definition exercises in the book with the students, but today it went very quickly.  For the idiom definition section of the book I made sure they had the correct definitions and told them what I expected of them: they must able to find meaning by using the context.  I pointed out that the test may demand something more, and that was beyond my power.  This is a pain in the ass and I hate the standard test already, although I am fairly certain I will apply my own grading criteria to correct its inequities.

After that cursory stuff I was able to devote almost the whole day to the grammar lessons and use.  Much if this is stuff they kind of know already, so I gave some demonstrations for activation, asked some open questions to get feedback about their level of understanding and for them to generate the rules. This was easiest in the class about Can and Could as ability modals.  Students knew other modals, used the book exercise to identify past and present use, I expanded the book work to include the form of the main verb, they could generate simple sentences and from all of this I wrote out the rules and sentence structure on the board in a clear and explicit manner.  I really like working this way.  I find it has a good rhythm and seems to construct itself.  The activation always seems to reinforce other aspects of grammar and help make connections to other forms.  Students are also able to make contributions, and I have found them to be generally helpful in part because they are often simpler. (James mentioned “be + able to” as having the same meaning; in the class on count and non-count nouns Junbeum pointed out that when you cut an apple into pieces apple becomes non-count noun.  Both insights were helpful to the class and to me as an instructor and would not have been realized if we just read the book.) 

With the rules established I gave them some very focused and partial practice to do using the sentence structure I wrote on the board.  This they worked on individually for a few minutes before finding other classmates to interview and find out about.  This was not timed and that turned out to be a blessing.  It allowed me to identify the students who struggled with exercise since they remained seated and to give them some specific help with problems they had while still practicing (not all could be resolved) it also allowed me to pair up the stronger students with these weaker students to give both some challenge.  Naturally the stronger students had finished first and had already practiced with one another.

I don’t think I was able to get to truly productive work today (the plan was to have them report on what they learned from others, but we ran out of time)  but we are pretty well set up for next class.  And only a day behind!

There were a few other things I wanted to add:

-          This method was a lot more interesting.  Class was fun and boisterous and time flew by.  This is definitely how I want to run the class.

-          Students were highly engaged and mostly motivated.  They were all engaged in much more useful and practical interactions today.

-          I had a major worry this morning when I saw that my notes from last semester were geared to the second writing assignment which has been discontinued.  To make up for this I prepared two assignments for each class, but only conducted one.  I am over-prepared for next time.      

Crappy Chapters

Lessons this week have been irritating and not very helpful.  I am wed to the book, so there are specific things I have to do and the students have to know, but the chapters we are using this week are incoherent and lack any real practical use or meaningful significance for the students.

For the lower level students the chapter is "Good Mood Foods".  This makes little sense to me.  Apparently, different foods make you feel differently.  The book establishes this in a very confusing way and is very inconsistent.  Most of the pictures that connect an emotionally state to a food are unclear or inconsistent and the activities are confusing to me.  I've adapted them as best I could, but I am not very good with discussing things like emotions This chapter is also almost entirely about listening and reading.  I have been using more extensive activation to warm up for the listening and generating prediction questions, as well as having them come up with things they would like to have answered, and that seems to be useful.  This takes up a lot of time, and the class does very little production. 

The higher level class has an even worse chapter.  The focus of the chapter is different dialects and accents.  It is almost entirely about listening to different accents.  This chapter is confusing to the students since they have a lot of trouble following standard English.  I have tried to do the exercises using my accent with a lot of extra MIC to guide them through listening and to try to pick up meaning.  This seems more useful since they can begin to understand, but the class becomes teacher-centric and all about me putting on a show for everyone.  Otherwise, the whole chapter is one long listening exercise, and not a good one either.

Today I play to have my own lesson for the higher classes using the distinction between formal English and slang, and to go through settings where each is appropriate.  I have made a sheet with common slang, contractions and this like that as an aid to appropriate use and pronunciation.  This addresses a need the students have since most of them can and do use words like "wanna" and "gonna" but do so incorrectly.  Some even slip these constructions into writing. I plan to have them produce through role playing or skit making to create English appropriate to the setting.  I have no idea how well this will work and am terrified that it will leave me a day behind with nothing to show for it.

Mid-Term

No lessons this week.  Conducting speaking tests for the mid terms.  Usual test style: reading, picture description, and opinion making.  The only change I have made this quarter was to grade along the lines of Fluency and Accuracy.  This has made grading a bit clearer and simpler.  I have also been using meaning has a better indicator of grade.  So, instead of just looking for the particular format of the answer, I have been listening for the knowledge/information communicated.  Does the response make sense?  Would a native speaker understand this?  The only problem is that this often allows a a bit of charisma to slip in, as students who are personable, but have little English ability  gain an advantage.  I have been aware of this and try to avoid grading on confidence and manners.

I was not able to really modify my lesson for the classes in the second half of the week.  I spent about a half-hour reviewing the opinion making exercises building on what we covered last time.  After that I reviewed a bit of the listening last time, had the students creat some questions they would ask if they interviewed someone who had run a marathon before listening to the interview.  Then we listened.  I checked comprehension using the questions we made. We worked from the general to the specific It took a while and we rushed through the rest of the class, barely covering everything we needed to in order to prepare them for the mid-term.

It seems to be effective to have a lot of warm up and activation but very time consuming.  In the future I would like to deviate from the book and use more interesting material.

Listening Exercises

This week we run into a lot of listening exercises in the book.  In the past I would of skipped over about half of them, but this semester we really have to teach the book, so I will be grinding through them this week.  Today I did it the way I normally would, but with a few modifications. I made these changes because I have picked up a few things at SMU, but I should mention that I haven't done the Harmer readings yet.  I will read that before I teach using more listening tomorrow.

The usual method to the listening exercises goes like this: We get the listening in the book and I ask the students to read the questions in the book before I play the file.  After the first time through, I tell the students to go through the questions again to answer what they can and to guess what they aren't sure of.  I tell them I will play it one more time and they should this to check the answers they already wrote and to listen for the things they don't know.  I always give specific time lengths for this.  When they have listened and are answering I tell them to ask one another the answers to the questions they don't know.  I do this to keep the faster students engaged and to give extra speaking and listening practice to the other students

This time I added some activation before even looking at the questions.  I asked question about prediction and for the students to make other questions they think might be answered/ other information we may get from the listening. 

Overall, it seems to have worked out better, but I can't really evaluate yet.  The first class had a listening file a manners survey that was done in 2001.  This was actually begun a week ago, they heard the file once  and completed some of the questions in the book.  I asked the students to remind me about what the topic of the listening was and for any details they remembered by using open referential questions.  I took responses from volunteers and by cold calling on others.  Some memories came back.  I went through the usual reminders and plowed through the file (about 5 minutes long). To get answers from this class I found that just reading the answer page and had the students reply in chorus. (The book looked like this: "They conducted the survey in ____________ countries.")  I don't know if this worked better or not.

The later classes listened to an interview with an ultramarathoner.  I tied this to the reading that we did as an earlier part of the lesson.  I did a lot of previewing for the earlier reading, I had the students make questions they would like to have answered about foot races.  After the reading and (the attached vocab lesson) we revisited the questions they made and found answers in the reasons.  I used this as a preview for the interview  and asked what they thought would be discussed and some of the potential answers.

As for the effect, the only thing I can mention is a quick comparison to the book questions.  The book does have a prediction question that should be answered after listening to a short excerpt.  Just using the question and the excerpt didn't help the students at all.  Talking through it, without the excerpt, produced much better results. 

I think the previewing is helpful.  Having the students read the questions before seems to be much more useful, too.  The only real problem is that this takes much longer than just playing the audio and moving on.  It is also difficult to tell how useful this is for the students.  The students who had a lot of trouble I had use the script in the back of the book, another thing that also seemed helpful.

I'll check the book and apply it tomorrow.

The Short Week

Short week this time.  Two days on, one day off, one day on.  Since all of our holiday fall on either a Monday or Wednesday the schedule becomes unbalanced for the students; those in Tuesday and Thursday classes end up with an extra week and a half of classes.

As such, today was a bit of a non-day.  The classes I held today were less formal and more about test prep and tasks.  We did photo description and opinion making and in one class a game about asking questions.  The special activity for me, and the one I saved for the blog, was a reading activity.

The reading activity was a bit deceptive.  I stitched together a few different news articles into one sheet and made handouts.  The first article was written for ESL students in 2010.  It was about a NK missile launch.  I just changed the dates and a few names and it seemed to work.  The next part was from a NYT article, as was the next bit, but for that one I dumbed-down the language a bit and broke up the dependent clauses into separate sentences.  One reason I did this was to test their level, I figured they would have trouble with the middle section.  Another reason was that I wanted them to give opinions, and everyone has an opinion about NK.  This article would also give them evidence to attach to reasons.  Finally, I wanted to see how they would evaluate the claims put forward by US, AK and NK officials for missile launches.

The assumption I was basing all of this on was that their schema, which would be in L1, would be applicable in L2.  That is, they have the understanding already, so they should be able to carry out the cognitive processes even if the input and output are both in TL. 

I used a common reading method process - skim to yourself, read aloud with a partner by trading off lines and then as a class.  However, I critically misjudged the time.  I planned for 20, gave them about 15 minutes which they used to read to themselves and each other, but we didn't read as a class.  I also had to rush the discussion.  Before the discussion I used a lot of closed display to check comprehension. It was surprisingly good.  They picked up words I didn't expect them to (I noted that they understood what it meant that "Obama leaned on China") and showed a strong understanding of everything.  They seemed to get the long quotes from the unaltered section, but I didn't probe as much as I wanted to.  They also produced good arguments and referred to parts of the text (I have here examples that related to food aid) and gave critical evaluations of the claims (not surprising to find that that did not believe NK, but it was surprising when they quoted the text to do it, especially the use of "commemorate").

While I liked the exercise and think it was a good way to utilize schema and develop interest, I know now that I need something a little longer and involved and with better in class activities and guided discussion.  Hopefully I can get ahead of the book at some point and use my pieces instead.

The Slog (cont.)

My cold is better. I can talk and walk a bit more.  I can mostly breathe without a nasty cough interrupting me. Things are looking up!

My early class today was my practice class.  The poor kids, they are my first of six classes and I learn all failures to plan from them.  Whatever goes wrong in this class gets fixed in the future classes.  That said, it generally went well today.  The main grammar lesson was making past tense questions (it was previewed last time and reviewed today). I activated this by changing the class intro a little.  Normally I go through common greetings and ask them how they are today.  I switched and asked them what they did last night or yesterday.  They gave good answers and required little scaffolding, usually the responded to repeated questions or "past tense" to self correct.  I gave the lesson using PPT and had students generate examples with answers. Then we used group work to practice and create discussion. Other things did not go so well.

One problem was that a pronunciation lesson handcuffed me a little bit.  It was a little mini lesson about pronouncing past tense verbs (with the ~t ~d or full ~ed sound) it required a lot more explanation than I thought it would.  We also started picture descriptions in this class which they were wholly unprepared for.  I put them in pairs and had one partner describe the picture to the other.  This did not work.  I had to strip it down and do a lot more modeling of a correct response.  I also gave them the pieces and had them make sentences as the class about different photos.

The second class went very well.  I did the same thing for an introduction and got the kids very involved.  I also used the WB a bit more to analyze the structure of past tense questions (Q word + did + subject + base verb...?) and had use that to make many different constructions.  I modeled a bit of the questions and answers with students before having them do group work.  I also gave more info about the pronunciation section including information about voicing and how they can feel it in their throat.  I used the WB more to display the answers.  This went much better.  Similarly, the picture description was better.  I started by modeling a good answer and then went through it piece by piece.  We identified nouns, attached adjectives, described actions and made complete sentences with it.

Although it went better, the second class did not get as far into the lesson as the first.  This shows what  is becoming the new problem - getting everything done.  Well, more like getting everything done correctly.  Anyone can cover everything in the book, but teaching everything in the book is a challenge.  I am however much happier with the way class is developing and the corrections I have been making.  The students are more involved and the lessons seem to be a bit more meaningful for them.  (note: if I lower the lights at all in the engineering class their eyes start to role into the backs of their heads. The poor kids are always barely awake.  One of them seemed to start to sleep with her eyes open a little, just the whites showing. Very creepy looking. Anyway, keep the lights on.)

The Slog

First a quick note to myself: keep this short.  Another, seemingly contradictory note: give details.

A new week and a new cold.  I am sick again and coughing horribly.  Yet I soldier on.

The main problem this week will be playing catch-up.  I am very far back on the book lessons and it will be a problem to get them all done.  Today I rushed through most of the material for English 1 and feel good about it.  It involved a lot of listening, some Q&A in the book and a short grammar lesson on past tense and making past tense questions.  I will have to revisit the PT question part on Wednesday to make sure.  The classes were well engaged and talkative and did well with peer correction and making complete sentences.

English 2 was even further back and less was completed today.  They worked on developing some of there own definitions and shared a lot of information on the theme of "identity theft".  They got through the listening and vocab work, but not the grammar lesson. Because there was a hang up due to a short section on prepositional verbs / idioms I was not able to even get to the main grammar lesson.

Short note:  This relates to the major problem I have with the text - why the hell were prepositional  verbs part of the lesson?  Are they extra vocab?  Are they another grammar lesson?  Should these be distinguished from other verbs that will be used later?  Is this important?

(It turns out the short note is important.  I just received an email regarding sample questions for the standardized final.  It appears that students will be tested on knowledge of the textbook content.  This requires more investigation.)

The other noteworthy event today was that I received student writing today.  Some still seem to be writing a sentence and skipping to the next line.  I've skimmed them and some are really excellent, but many are missing basic things like the student's name.  Freshmen...

More of the same, but better

This week has been interesting so far.  My classes have their writing assignments due next Monday or Tuesday depending on their class time.  To prepare for the papers I have been spending about a half hour per class teaching and preparing writing.  This requires some background.

It should probably be mentioned that the university has cut back on the writing requirement.  Previously, students had to write two short assignments during the semester.  This has been reduced to one assignment that counts for only five percent of the grade.  For perspective, attendance counts as for ten percent, twice as important as writing.  Although this means the school thinks writing is not important I do think it is a necessary skill. All of the teachers constantly receive horrible emails from the students, basically illegible, horrible formatting, etc.  This, I feel, reflects as poorly on the school as it does the students, so I took it upon myself to help correct some of the major problems.  Writing a clear email has been the assignment this quarter.

Teaching writing has been alright.  It started with a lot of examples and fixed expressions, some stuff about format.  This week they actually got to writing and I think it worked well.  I taught them to outline (a skill that is surprisingly weak) last time and today they wrote their emails freehand.  The first class I messed up a little bit.  I only gave them oral instructions and wrote a little on the board.  This proved to be a mistake. 

I needed to show them paragraph format.

but many kept writing sentences.

like this.

I had to correct students one on one and even then I don't think it was very effective.  In later classes I used PPT and examples generated in word and projected onto the board.  This worked great and seemed to help the whole class.

A nice thing that came out of the lesson was that I was able to do a lot of one on one work with the students.  Working with them personally was a nice change and it seems to help them more.  They were asking more questions this way, and this was both a great way to teach them and to get feedback on things I may have forgotten, overlooked, or not presented clearly.  Space was a challenge because of the seating arrangement but I managed to meet with each student and give some corrections.  I did my best to balance the time but had some difficulties doing this because the good students had so many questions and the poor students needed so much guidance.

We also worked on short skits today in the classes.  In one class the students needed to make a skit using words from a book chapter (the were related to crime, so there were many murders) the other needed to make an ad for some product.  This required them to work in groups of four or five and work cooperatively to produce a script.  They managed to do this pretty well and they required very little feedback from me.  Some of the groups required more facilitation than others because not everyone would contribute (or the group was dominated by one or two stronger-skilled students) or they would slip into a lot of Korean, or just to get them focused and working on the task at hand.  Usually I just needed to use some referential questions to get the conversation going.  Occasionally, I would use examples or modeling to get them going.  I gave almost no feedback on grammar or spelling unless it affected the meaning of what they were trying to say.

The result was that the groups were able to negotiate the meanings of the statements they contributed to the skit.  The generated a lot of English sentences and gave each other a lot of correction and sometimes even scaffolding to create what they wanted to say. 

The skit performance was really good.  The students spoke well and were very engaged.  After each performance I would ask the class or individuals some display questions to see if they understood the skit and follow up with a few referential questions about why things happened or about an opinion about something that happened.

All together I think everything went well.  I spoke very little in a monological manner.  I managed to engage in dialog with all of the students in my classes.  The only problem was that I did almost none of the book work that I have to do.  I'll get that done next week.

Repeating the repeats

Tuesday again and another day of repeats.  This one was a mixed bag.  Some success some failures.

For all of my classes I am using the same worksheet for the writing assignment.  I have no idea how well they write, so it is also a way to gauge where they are as students.  I used the two examples on the paper as speaking practice as well, first in PW/GW and also for class instruction.  Most classes went wild on the paper and talked about everything.  High energy, lots of interaction, good feedback about their ability as well. 

There were only two problems with this.  The first was that it took up a lot of time.  I should have been teaching them from the book but instead I taught them how to write.  I think this is worth it, but it has put us further back, and we will have to cram book stuff later in the week.  The other problem is that today one class just shut down. They were the business majors.  The business majors exhibit a totally different attitude than the other classes.  They are quiet and completely resist almost all GW and will rarely share answers.  They are also deeply stratified and have the widest divergence of skill and sit accordingly (oddly, even the best students in this class seem worse then students in my lower level classes).  They remain hierarchical and gendered.  Those in the front try to dominate while some in the back only use non-verbal communication.  This will require some intervention.

Otherwise, things went well.  I am aware of my tendency to use IRF and have been trying to leave the F more open with follow up questions, passing it to other students, or any other strategy. I managed to resist the temptation to give direct correction to errors by using different ways to get a correct answer with varying success.  The best response seems to depend on the student.  I have also tried to model GW questions and answers better with a few students before having students do GW.  Overall, the changes seem to be working.  I noticed students have responded more to non-verbal cues (like hand raising and answering in complete sentences) and generally seem better acclimated to class and the expectations of classroom behavior.  (The major exception being the business majors).

Another point of note involves some professional feedback in the office.  Some other teachers were working out the subtle differences between "overachiever" and "workaholic" to teach as a definition.  I discussed the success I had breaking the words down, and explaining the meaning of "over~" and "~holic".  Breaking the words into pieces worked great and students were instantly able to make new words like "shopaholic" and to understand words they had never heard of before, like "chocoholic".  Knowledge spreads. 

Tuesday is a repeat of Monday

I did the same lessons today but tightened them up a bit.  I used clearer questions and gave students a partial script on PPT.  All book activities were completed and I was able to learn more about student laevels and give background review (in this case I reviewed nouns and adj and third person "s"."  I have also reviewed some of the video to check how I interact with the students for Q & A.  I am trying to use fewer leading questions (I am there to teach after all) and to give clearer directions and expectations for activity outcome.  The video shows that I am consistent with the physical cues I give (for the use of hands to answer questions, to speak in complete sentences, to speak louder, repeat, etc.) and they seem to be responding to them although it is still very early in the course.  I did have to use the mike a bit today b/c my voice was shot, hope it makes it through tomorow.

After a weekend away

The good news is that the room setup is working out and the names are getting easier to remember.  The desks move easily and are very conducive to pair and group work.  Names are still tough but I have found that the more I repeat them in class the easier they are to keep in my head even across the 4 days since I last met with the kids.  My memory is also a good indicator of who is participating in class.

Two remarkable events occurred today.  The first was that the personalities of the classes became much clearer, the second was that the class plan I devised lost rigor across the three hours of teaching.  On the topic of personality I can say that the first class of the week is more open and friendly.  They generally show high levels of participation and motivation while displaying a greater skill level than expected.  The second class (computer engineering) is quiet and withdrawn and the students do not like to engage in any form of conversation.  They have a wide variance in skill levels and some have a proficiency below that necessary for the class.  The third class is more like the first, but needs a lot more guidance, but this assessment could be based on the diminished amount of order I imposed on them.

This second issue caused the day to end on a bit of a low note.  I had a pretty solid approach for the first class, and stuck to it very well.  I devised clear questions, established groups and and gave clear directions that I applied evenly.  By the third I was not doing this - class questions became vague or just different; sometimes I required hands to speak, sometimes not; etc -  and the class suffered because of it.  I also managed to forget an entire section of the lesson.

I watched some of a recording of class I made today and (when not cringing) I noticed that I look remarkably dickish. I also use a lot of non-verbal cues to encourage certain responses like answers in complete sentences, hand raising, pair work. I seem to apply them consistently in this video, but I know that in the later class some of that broke down, too.   I 'll probably check that again tomorrow.

Also, it should be noted that I did not feel very well this morning.  My throat started hurting last night and really hurt this morning,  Now it is screaming.  A regiment of honey is in order this evening.

Back to the front lines

This week class started up again at Chung-ang (CAU) and there are a number of changes that I need to remark on to explain the teaching conditions I will be facing this semester.  The first is the change in the number of students per class, which has jumped up quite a bit.  Second, there have been changes to the testing which will require a change in the material I focus on.  Finally, I have to remark on some the changes I will make to my teaching based on my experience last quarter and the classes at SMU.

Last week we had the usual dreadful department where the faculty was informed of all the changes that were made without any input from them.  For the most part, the problems faced are due to the need to cut tuition, and all cuts in tuition necessarily affect the budget, so we have to do just as much with less funding.  The solution for the English instruction department seems to have been a mix of attrition and increased enrollment - a deadly mix. 

The practical impact of these changes is that the class size is larger.  Classes were previously capped at 25, but now they have been increased to 30.  This semester there is no class larger than 28, but already I have noticed a difference , especially since I never had a class above 20 before and the class I had in the winter was only about 12 students on any given day. This presents a number of new problems and challenges.

One of the problems turns out to be spatial.  There just isn't enough room for everyone in the classroom.  This is true even after I send late students to empty classrooms to poach empty desks (I hope this doesn't become a major problem throughout the semester).  The classroom I taught in today (all three of my classes are in the same room, back to back to back) has already taken on the appearance of a jetliner.   The four rows of seats have become two as desks are now pushed together with one of the desks against the wall.  And just like a jet plane there is little leg room and the aisle is just wide enough to push a drink cart down.  This also makes it difficult to see everyone so I often move around a bit and even stand on my tip toes to see the students in the back. 

The lack of space has been a challenge for getting everyone involved in group work.  I tried to make the students do introductions today and found that they needed very structured directions to be able to meet people is the small bit of space.  Although this worked, it was very cramped and I had difficulty meeting with each group.  There was another issue that became obvious once they all started working -  28 kids talking at one time is loud.

Aside from the spatial problems I have a few worries about the sheer numbers that I will be reflecting on as the semester proceeds.  The first is remembering names.  I am horrible at it and more students equals more problems.  I have had them make nameplates and I refer to them in class often, but the structure makes it difficult to see them.  The second is the speaking test at midterm and finals.  The test is a one-on-one test that takes about 7 minutes per student.  I now have two 75 minute periods to conduct almost 200 minutes of testing.  This also leads to the other issue discussed last week.

CAU is moving to a standardized test format for the spoken and written tests.  These tests will be based almost entirely on the book (note: The book is Northstar and it is my personal nemesis.  There is no part of it I do not hate.) so teachers must teach the entire book thoroughly.  This attitude makes me sick and fills me with dread, but I have formulated a few reponses.

Based on my previous experience and the class at SMU I have thought about a couple changes I need to make to the class.  The first is a greater focus on conversation and practical discussion.  In this regard the book is worthless and merely an obstacle to be overcome.  I'll try to include more realistc language and common usage in the lessons and exercises.  I'll also shape content to useful matters - the writing assignment will be on how to write an email, something I they need to get better at and which they will probably actually do.

As a final note, I must find a way to write less here in the future...