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.