Micro teach 2 - Presentation

Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3xjOpP5POA

Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EAT4ApB0NU


   According to how this lesson was set up, I jumped right in to the listening activity part for the presentation. Part of the idea for this was that students have already heard these words in their respective TOEIC prep classes, so it is my job to incorporate them into a lesson when I can. I also give the student 15 minutes at the beginning of every class to read their previous assignment, which would have included the section for the reading task. Warm up is typically a review of the last classes dialogue on plot and theme of the novel so this activity is referring back to their current reading homework and current TOEIC lessons. Perhaps understanding these lessons as a 9 minute segment in a class of native speakers is difficult, and even when I watch it, it is a bit awkward in my interaction with the students. In my real class, they tend to ask a few more questions, and there are always a couple of them lagging behind, which gives me the chance to incorporate more student talk by having them explain to each other what instructions i had given. As this activity gets beyond the listening stage, we have time for pair work in discussing their answers, and then composing their own new sentences with key words from the text and the transition words they learned.
   As for my personal performance during this lesson, I think I did a bit better at slowing down my speech, but at times I tend to ramble on sarcastically or unnecessarily, which may confuse students if they try to follow every word I say. This is something that I have struggled with since the first lesson I ever taught back in the states. I think my brain just goes on moving my mouth without me actually meaning to talk. One thing I noticed from doing those silent lessons a couple weeks ago is that I really need to keep my damn mouth shut when there is nothing comprehensible or meaningful coming out of it, which actually applies to all the time and not just class. Having students stand up, especially for my early morning crew, is really helpful, and I have learned that I need to get them up and moving randomly during my 2 hour classes. It helps them stay awake, but if also gives me a chance to breathe, and change gears for a new activity. My WB use was pretty limited, but generally I cover the thing with illustrations and outlines to cover the dialogue. Usually if I screw up a drawing or make it overtly humorous on purpose, it gets the students attention and perhaps engages their memory a bit. I know this activity bleeds in to other tasks that involve more discussion, which is what my classes are based on, so getting students to talk isn't the difficult part for me in my current position. The difficult thing is sorting out some TLC to work into my lessons and matching that up with the other TOEIC teachers. That is where the real work comes in, as my class time is usually fairly enjoyable both for myself and my students. Now if I could get them to like homework!

You shur do talk funny

Here are a handful of videos that sample some interesting accents

Eastern banks and inlets of Virginia and North Carolina
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csfyrRqc5TU&feature=endscreen&NR=1
(That's what my mom's family sounds like)

Southern Appalachian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU
(What my dad's family sound like)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJC4QufWs0
(What people sound like in my hometown)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScELaXMCVis
(I think a lot of similarities between this one and some of the American southern accents are pretty clear, especially with the drawn out vowels)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTr-UlyLI_I
Cajun Dialect - the best thing about this video is it takes him a full minute and a half to roll a cigarette, and his wife has been making coffee for an hour. Oh, to have that kind of time!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_vWR_lNY8s&NR=1&feature=endscreen
(from an excellent docu-movie about irish travelers(Brad Pitt from Snatch) and their family feud, great for the language content)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0i2abKXr9c
This clip explores different parts of the states, but i like minute 2:30 and 33:00. Their accents are a jumble of north, south and british that is really hard to place in a category


Teaching English w/ Ricky Gervais
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw2bTpyHGCE

And I could never forget the best of all my kin from the mountains
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc3SEBA-9nU

Quiet as a church mouse

The Silent Treatment
Part 1 - http://youtu.be/MDJVLAWx51A
Part 2 - http://youtu.be/XTclXVlPBzk
Part 3 - http://youtu.be/d0kzFt8oh2M

After Tom had talked last week about the notion that teachers are useless, I thought about in what ways we can fail at teaching and for me especially, how I have a tendency to talk students through problems too much, and don't allow them to work out things with my mouth shut. Well, as I was recovering from my sinus infection, nature took away my voice for the first couple days of last week so I decide to do a little activity with my students to review from the lessons before midterm week and holiday week. Basically I set up the class in this format. I couldn't speak, so I had the whiteboard and a few simple gestures I would do for things like "speak in full sentence" "think about" "say" "why' "how" and "more please". I was really surprised how well the student could understand what information I wanted from them and the quality of their responses. I filmed it for a couple of classes, but the first day, the camera got flipped somehow and recorded the window, and the second class, half of the video is blurry (first half to come on youtube after upload time). These classes made me realize how effective i can be while remaining silent. There are many occasions where I should keep my mouth shut, or at least simplify my speech in order to get the students thinking out language problems on their own. We read about error correction being fairly useless unless it gets the student actively thinking about how to construct the answer to their problem. Its definitely a concepts I need to try to use more often.

Listening Lesson

Part 1 - http://youtu.be/eUUSybPn91Y
Part 2 - http://youtu.be/Zq0yq4FSQjs
Part 3 - http://youtu.be/ZrSHMaTHUyk
Part 4 - http://youtu.be/So2NbHHH_j0

Since I saw a lot of us get torn apart last week for performing poorly at our reading lessons (thankfully I survived nearly unscathed) I thought I would practice a Harmer listening activity in class before Saturday's demo. The task was to show a short conversation in a film scene and have students listen and watch for detail. I noticed that the activity seemed to focus more on observing skills than it did listening skill, which was a little strange since this is supposed to be a listening task. I think there are a couple of adjustments that need to be made to this activity to get the students focused on listening. First, I think I would incorporate one of the viewing techniques from B1 or B2 in the text to get the students thinking about forming language rather than describing scenery. Not to devalue the benefits this will have at speaking, but listening is the focus. I had one clip of a conversation b/w two people where the man asks the woman to dinner and phones up to make reservations. (Some of you will probably see this in class). I think to add some interesting language skills to this clip, I should mute the reservation call so that student can practice listening to the set up and confirmation dialogue of the two characters, then build language to fill in the missing sound byte based on what they understand about conversation pattern from what they heard. The good thing about this clip is that the actual reservation call in not a normal situation, so student would build dialogue predicting the normal response, but then hear the opposite. After we could discuss why the man may have acted the way he did, but the main point is getting students to hear conversational English, and fill in gaps by producing sensible speech. So that would be my first adaptation of this activity. Second, I think there are some things I could do to increase student output beyond simple comprehension checking. I should create some questions that focus on abstract ideas from the scene rather than physical details. This might get the student thinking a bit more and producing better language. I just threw this activity in as a fun and different thing to do since we were a little ahead in the lessons, but I think the reservation clip could definitely be worked into a lesson about that kind of topic. I also need to be more vague about direct questioning, and try to have student speak more to work out what information I am trying to elicit from them. I think that would make this task more enjoyable to teach.
******Videos to follow after the 256 minute load time*******

Death to iOS 6

I am writing this while anger is fresh in my mind..... Death to iOS 6. Today I lost my voice from this annoying sinus infection I have been battling with over the last week. So I attempted to teach a class with no voice. I needed to do a review from the long break over holidays and midterms, so i basically set up a few"signs" I would to to get the students speaking (repeat, think, speak, full sentence, etc...). Everything was going well, me brilliantly using my CIs and MICs so I could do a nice reflective blog. And all the while, my trusty little iPhone filming away so I could review my actions as a teacher with no voice. The review went well enough and despite being distracted by a few late students, I had about 40 minutes of me silently provoking students to speak, and successfully so. This was probably my lowest level class, but the girls did really well at explaining their ideas more thoroughly when prompted and I was very happy.  So after class, I sat down to review my awesome footage, only to find that somehow the camera had been switched to the reverse lens, leaving me with a lovely 40 minute shot of a dirty window, and not a glimpse of my teaching. On top of that, my classroom acoustics are shit, so it sounds like we are all hanging out in a tunnel with too many echoes. So much for reviewing and posting a good video. That being said, I can polish up a few things and try the lesson with tomorrow's class. I just hope iOS 6 doesnt decide to pull another fast one on me. Fool me once, shame on iPhone, fool me twice, shame on Steve Jobs.

Copy Cat

Weekly classroom Experience

I was going to write about a class I had with my business students on presentation techniques that went pretty well, but then I had a university student blatantly plagiarize a midterm essay, so I thought that would be more interesting to blog about in terms of making some kind of moral decision in the classroom. My first reaction to the paper was, “Oh, google translate.” But as I read through the paper, I noticed it was too good for google to handle so I did some searching and found a Chinese website that had her answer word for word (she is Chinese btw). I couldn’t tell what kind of web page it was, so I had to make certain that is was a copy. I enlisted some translation help and found out that is was indeed a sight giving answers to essays on English topics. As it happened, the student had messaged me several times making sure her paper was okay. I first decided to ask her if she was sure she wanted to hand this copy in as her final draft. She said yes, which was expected, but then said that she had ‘worked so hard’ on it. Here, I had to make a decision, whether to follow my instinct (something akin to burning her at the stake) or to expose the situation to her and get her reaction. I messaged her saying that I know she copied it and that she should write another essay, a fairly lenient judgment in my opinion. She insisted that she had only emailed it to her sister in China to check it, but after I explained how I knew, she finally came clean and said she was ashamed. So in the end, I told her she had to write another essay by the weekend (what a saint I am). This goes against school policy and probably all that is right and decent in the notion of honest education, but in the end I made a judgment to give her another chance. In my perfect world, I could have sent her packing, but I think I had to weigh out my effort in bringing this up with superiors at the university, my responsibility as an employee under school policy, and what possible outcomes might arise from the situation. I hope I chose wisely.