10 October 2013

10 October 2013

Today I had a chance to sleep in a bit – my first class wasn’t until 1150am. However, my day didn’t end until after 630pm, so, trade-off. I got up, and got dressed. As I was teaching today, I wore my skirt and tights, as it looks more formal and blends in better. I also applied more make-up than I usually do. I had a very lazy and relaxed breakfast of kasha and coffee, before heading to class. I wore my Merrels (as my nice shoes rub blisters if I try to walk a long distance in them), and brought my nice shoes in my bag. The school has some security guards that sit at the front door, and one of them gave me a funny look (black skirt, professional dress, brown sneakers, hand knit blue/green socks), until I changed into my nice shoes. I jokingly asked “better?” as I don’t think they speak much/any English, but one of them nodded. There is a very strict dress code at School #5, and a lot of the male students wear suits to class, so those shoes really stood out. I then went off to my class. There were 6 students in class, and I was teaching a review unit, I think. I started off by introducing myself and letting them introduce themselves. In order to make them feel more comfortable about speaking up in class, I then introduced myself in Russian, mentioning that I was also learning a new language.

After that, I had them do some exercises with “who, whose, that, which, where,” which were in their workbook, by answering the question out loud. They had about 20 questions, and they only got one wrong (One student confused “is this the” with “this is the”). I explained why her answer was wrong – “is this the” means that it has to be a question – and added that had it been “this is the” she would have been right. After that, we went into a vocab review. I gave them 2 minutes to work with their desk-mate and come up with as many sentences that they could with the words. One group didn’t really work together, and almost all of their sentences were exactly as used previously in the textbook. I had them read their sentences to the class. After that, I went over 8 “new” words, explaining them, and giving examples. I then had them work together to create a story using the new words. I had two students switch seats, to try to get better pairings for the stories. The stories were correctly written, but not as creative as I would have liked. Very few pronunciation and grammatical errors. After that, I went over three new words, which have similar meanings to new words: tour vs. trip, bank vs. shore, brochure vs. leaflet. I think that they understood the words, as one of them was able to give me an example.

I still managed to finish 10 minutes early, so I tried to get the students to ask me questions. They seemed a bit shy, so Y suggested questions for them to ask me. They seemed fascinated by Obi-Wan, so I answered lots of questions about him. After class was over, I talked to Y about what classes she wanted me to observe, and what class she wanted me to teach next week. She wants the same schedule – observe on Tuesday, teach on Thursday. Then, I had a short break before I had to co-teach “Teaching vocab.”

M and I had spent hours preparing this lesson, so I thought it was at least presentable. We presented how the various books thought that a native TEFL should teach/present vocab, having them guess how we know words. We created a vocab list, and then had them play a Jeopardy! style game, where they had to answer in the form of a question, and give the vocab word. Some were easier than others: this Celine Dion song was used as the ______ for Titanic (Theme song; “What is “My Heart Will Go On””). One of the questions was a perfect example of connection: one of our questions (Bono preformed this song as a __________ in Across the Universe) we thought was going to be very hard, but Across the Universe is one of my cluster-mates (L)’s favourite movies, and the “answer” (“What is “I am the Walrus””) is the song she associates the strongest with Bono. We then pointed out that connections are incredibly important when teaching vocab – L knew that answer because she knew the movie – which means that you can build off what the students already know. One of my cluster-mates (E) wasn’t quite sure as to the objectives of the game – he gave the vocab word, but didn’t “question” the “answer.” We then explained the purpose of the game – it was a game that could be scaled (don’t use “Social-activism” for lower forms), adapted to just about any topic (one of our questions was about Beatlemania), and can be used in just about any stage of the lesson (it could be presentation, practice, application, or reserve activity). We then went back over the important things to remember when teaching vocab, and some strategies for that.

After we finished teaching, S told us what we need to do for tomorrow, and some of what we need to do for next week, before telling M and me that we did a great job. We were able to leave a few minutes early, which gave us a longer lunch break. It was also 2pm, which is why my day ended so late. Class started at 315, and ended almost 3 and a half hours later, with a 15 minute break snuck in there. In Russian, we learned some words that describe frequency, as well as words to describe a school day. We talked about our first lesson, and went over various sentences that we’d written to practice grammatical forms. We said the sentence in English, and one of our cluster-mates got to translate it. We went over the daily routine vocab, asking our cluster-mates questions about what we were doing, when/where we did things. We practiced the words again, and then had a brief break.

After the break, we learned some very important things – days of the week, months of the year, and what preposition (and case) to use with them. We played a game with spelling them, and putting them in order. We also answered questions about what holiday was in what month. We had to say what month our birthday was in. We then got our home task (ask our host family some questions and go over the vocab, again).

I walked back to the apartment, had dinner (after being fussed at because it was late and I hadn’t eaten at PC), and did my homework. I was able to hang out online and chat with my parents, which was awesome.