Friday, September 14, 2007

Teaching: Week Four

First off, has it really only been four weeks?! FOUR WEEKS?! Good, Lord, have mercy on my synapses as they attempt to relay the idea that what has felt like eons (by Oxford American Dictionaries’ astronomical and geological definition, never by the general definition) was a mere FOUR WEEKS?! Let me count:

Week 1: Self-Introduction/Class Expectations
Week 2: “Flea, Fly, Mosquito”/TPR 1
Week 3: TPR 2/“The Announcer’s Test”
Week 4: Emotions

I need to sit down…

As I said, this week was on Emotions. I’m a little tired of hearing, “Fine, and you?” to the question, “How are you?” so I thought I’d print up an emotions chart (the kind some American teachers/college students put up on their walls) to give my students as a handout and show them some slides asking them for each one, “How does the picture make you feel?” Then, I would ask them a hard question: “Why?” This allowed them to practice expressing emotions and thoughts. Some took advantage of it to the best of their ability, whether that be single words or full blown sentences. Others were less interested or still too shy to even make an attempt. For the most part, it went well. The students enjoyed the pictures, even if they didn’t feel comfortable talking about them, and I enjoyed teaching the lesson, even if the rainy weather did require a bit more energy out of me to keep their interest than usual. At the end of the slideshow, I showed them a picture of the two Korean flags and asked them how these made them feel and why. I told them that this is what an American actually wanted to know from them, so it would be important for them to learn how to express themselves on the matter of national division and possible reunification. I followed that with something fun, showing a particularly emotional music video, Linkin Park’s “Numb”.

For the second graders, I added in another activity: I gave them a printed copy of “The Announcer’s Test”, which I had presented to them the week before. I told them that it wasn’t homework and it wasn’t a test. It was simply something extra. If they wanted to do it and if they had time, they could memorize—

One hen,
Two ducks,
Three squawking geese,
Four limerick oysters,
Five corpulent porpoises,
Six pairs of Don Alveero’s trousers,
Seven thousand Macedonian soldiers in full battle array,
Eight brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt,
Nine diabetic, apathetic, sympathetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity towards procrastination and sloth,
Ten lyrical, spherical, diabolical denizens of the deep whirling, swirling, twirling in the corner of an aquarium seemingly going nowhere.

(Note: This is not the actual “Announcer’s Test,” but an adapted version since even I don’t know the meaning to all the words in the actual version. Being an English teacher, I should probably learn them, however.)

—by September 28 and recite it to me in the teacher’s office, then I would give them a prize. I’ve already had one particularly ambitious student recite it to me. (She started the semester late because she was in Europe on a three week whirlwind tour, has given me a small Korean language exercise book since she knows I’d like to learn her language, and has approached me about learning her name and even given me a mnemonic device to remember it by—her given name sounds like Eugene, as in Eugene O’Neill, whom she has read. She wants to be a diplomat.) I didn’t even have the prize ready for her yet, but have since settled on wafers filled with chocolate, as a couple of others are also close.

(SIDE NOTE: I have a couple of second graders who try to visit me daily, and I appreciate their company as their English is really quite good.)

As for my adult classes, the advanced class watched “The Pursuit of Happyness” starring Will Smith. My bringing in a movie is another result of my being tired, I fear. I had intended to talk about the social issues the movie brings up though. I thought the question of family separation and who should take care of the child (the mother or the father) would have brought out some especially interesting conversation among my Korean audience. Unfortunately, my presence was requested for some filming for the Provincial Brd. of Edu., and I had to cut class short. Next week, though, we will talk about the film until I’ve exhausted it’s usefulness. After that, I want to read Mencius and Hsün Tzu’s views on human nature with them. See how they like discussing philosophy, the good, the true, and the beautiful, and all that sublimity.

With the beginning adult class, I discussed the many ways English speakers use the word “get”, both as a verb in its own right and also as a phrasal verb combined with different prepositions. We also watched “The Pursuit of Happyness” during the second half of our class periods, and thus will still be watching it on Thursday, when next we meet.

The filming for the BoE has actually been fairly annoying, as it is all staged. The BoE is interested in the hamlet’s high school because, despite the fact that it is in a rural area, it does fairly well with testing and university placement. Granted, it’s no science school or language institute, but it does alright by itself every October when the national placement tests come around. Thus, the BoE is going to visit. Thus, we’ve been filming class time to show to our visitors.

But, as I said, what we film is all staged. We filmed me “co-teaching” with two classes. During this co-teaching, I performed lessons I had never even seen before and basically acted out what the camera man told me to. In the end, it ended up being fairly close to what I do in class anyway, but it just seemed… fake. It also didn’t help that this was on a Monday, usually a day off for me where I’m at school but not actually working, and so I was in my Monday clothes—jeans and a polo. I usually wear slacks and a long-sleeved button-down for teaching. Later on in the week, I was asked to videotape for the English Zone, an English only room where students get prizes for performing scripted situational dialogues in English. (This is what interfered with my advanced adult class above.) The problem with this was that, although the high school may have used that room dozens of times, I’d never been there before, and thus had no idea what was going on.

Sigh… staying flexible is key.

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