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.)