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  It is sort of an outdated archetype.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.