Hello again from Thailand. This man aspiring for gainful employment, trying to remember what happens in his life from day to day, and hoping to share those memories with his loved ones (I'll be mushy. I miss my family and friends very much) is posting what he's teaching here in this post (Wow! I don't believe it).
Well, start believing it. I complain a lot about the work I have to do each week. I was told that I had to make three lesson plans per week that focused on speaking and listening. Well, I had no idea I had to actually make them. The internet has been crap when it comes to providing speaking and listening lessons that interest and engage my students without bending their minds too badly. Also I found it best to pretend that each class of 40 or so students is really a group of three or four students and make lesson plans for each of those teams. That way you can be assured more participation, but a lot more preparation like this lesson where I wrote about 32 different conversations.
Each conversation is supposed to hint at the relationship between A & B and simultaneously be entertaining to read. Some conversations are better than others. The drawback is that this lesson doesn't really involve speaking or listening. I argued that the speaking and listening part came from me trying to help the students complete the worksheet. During the lesson, I added a part where they not only had to circle which two people were talking but they also had to tell me why they thought that way. That cut down on christmas-treeing* the worksheet.
The other exercise that took a lot of preparation was an idea stolen from the internet. The teacher reads one prompt. The students have a different prompt and are supposed to knock when they hear something different. I thought that was too easy, and decided to make eight different worksheets with eight slightly-differing readings and eight different sets of questions. It worked okay. The worst part was reading the teacher part for each class louder than the kids were chattering amongst themselves. I think my voice is louder and/or hoarser these days because of it.
Alternatively, I play games in the classroom with an accompanying worksheet so that the students have fun in class and everybody still works rather than the common occurence: three kids play the game and the other kids do whatever they want. I thought I came up with a good way to play a game, have a worksheet, and make myself solely a referee of the game rather than the MC of said game (English teachers can only be an entertaining and educating MC to a part of the class at any one time while the other parts do what they really want to do). I took the basic points and categories format of Jeopardy and made it about common Who, What, and Where questions. I let the kids make team names, and they got into it. Took the worksheet, corrected it, and got 10 marks for final grades.
That's this here document
I had troubles with some classes because of poor rapport with kids. It still is a one group at a time exercise, so sometimes it's boring, and for some classes it's too damn easy, but I used it. I used it for my 8th grade and Sophmore High-schoolers. The more I do a lesson, the more I get a good flow or a good feeling about teaching it. For two classes, I hadn't taught the lesson in a week and so I wasn't able to be quite as good as my prime. At some point, I get tired of whatever worksheet I'm teaching or stop believing in the worksheet, and the kids pick up on that. So, the performance is as much a part of the worksheet as anything.
For the times when I can't seem to make a game from the material, I'm stuck trudging the kids through the material. This happens a lot with the 8th grade kids. Basically, I make taking notes in class look like a worksheet, which is what I am doing this week to teach new vocabulary with the superlative form.
A few times I've been able to make a logic puzzle for the kids. Puzzles like solving Cryptograms with scrambled words (see last page)and Crosswords can be fun and still use English.
I have classes of seniors, and teaching them is a dream compared to all the other classes. I often just give them scraps of paper like this exercise where I gave each student a question, asked them to write the answer in passive voice and then present it to the class. or this exercise where I took lyrics from songs, asked the students to convert them to passive voice, write it on the board, and then figure out what popular song they came from.
I did something similar with m4 this week, and they heckle each other and me most of the lesson, which makes a simple exercise more interesting. So, this is an example of using students' misbehavior to help them learn.
This week I have remembered that most students will do anything to either make the assignment look stupid or avoid doing the assignment completely, but the students that can do it will do it. It is somewhat disparaging to learn how unwilling many students are to challenge themselves. Sometimes getting work from students is like ramming your head against a wall. Maybe the wall will crack, maybe it won't. There's gotta be a better metaphor for that, but I haven't thought of it yet.
I'm on food coma from a fried vegetables over rice dish. It was oily.
-Pray for learning. Pray for peace.
*When I was in high school, we took a silly scantron test twice a year. It took a day, was boring as anything, and the questions hardly changed from year to year. So, students (we) rarely paid attention to the test. Instead they (not me 'cause [1] I was always a good kid and do not karmically deserve the treatment I receive now for my misbehavior at that time ::wink wink:: and [2] because there was nothing better to do in the test-taking room than take the test) guessed randomly on the scantron sheet. The placement of the filled-in bubbles resembled a christmas tree. Christmas Treeing is marking random answers on a given assignment without paying attention to what the assignment actually requires.
**The songs in the passive voice song exercise are (in sequential order) from [1]Taylor Swift's "Fearless,"[2]Iyaz's "Solo," [3] Ke$ha's "Tick-Tock," [4]Usher's "DJ's Got us Falling in Love Again," [5] Justin Bieber's "Baby," [6] Enrique Iglesias' "Baby, I like it," and [7] Flo Rida's "Low."
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