mothwing | Entries tagged with teaching

After my conference was over, I had an hour to kill in Amsterdam in the evening before heading home.

( Stroll from Amsterdam Centraal down the Damrak to the Royal Palace and back )

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Location: Germany, Bremen

I really enjoyed the book and I really enjoy the official page of the book, and there are a number of cool things you could do with the material in terms of media projects, from podcasts to book trailers to viral campaigns in connection with a colleague's reading project for students whose reading is less than exemplary.

The project page is a really good starting point for ideas, too.

Current Mood: cold

I have a problem resisting old school books, especially for English and German classes - though I suppose ancient Biology books have the potential to be even more fascinating.

My most recent purchase is "The New Guide 1", which is from the early fifties and for Volksschulen, a school that covered years 1-8 for those students who were not likely to go on to tertiary education - until 1964 (West Germany), when they were replaced with a primary - secondary system and the secondary system got more differentiated as the Volksschule was replaced with the Grundschule for primary education, Haupt- and Realschule for secondary education.

The book frequently confuses me - I can see that the point of this is to teach students sounds, but the progression doesn't make sense to me - sentences like "My name is _____, what is your name?" that we covered in session two don't feature at all until Lesson 33, and the first things people learn are individual words and texts written to introduce the students to new sounds and what the book considers to be important spellings of the sound.

The book doesn't introduce characters the students can get used and attached to, and the stories in the book frequently touch upon poverty and hardship. Or they start out as cute and and then take a sudden turn, like this one:

( More weirdness - father is not rich and Enid does not like black people (chimney sweeps in this case) )

Current Mood: calm

Want to see something scary?

One of my students failed his last English exam - he got a 6, the worst mark on the German grading system. Very concerned, my boss and I asked him to bring it along, because we wanted to see what on earth could have gone so wrong - he'd been steadily improving, and his last written exam had been a (weakish) 4.

And then we saw the exam paper.
After getting together and poring over the thing together for a couple of minutes, we also have a pretty clear idea about:

1.) why our student failed,
2.) the age of his teacher,
3.) the up-to-dateness of his teaching methods,
4.) how tech-savvy the guy is
5.) which English book is his favourite (I'm thinking this one).

Look:

Most of the problems the student had resulted from not being able to make sense of the questions - well, obviously, they're seventh graders, and it's 2010, not 1970, for heaven's sake!

Current Mood: aghast

Good: Mrs Homophone 2010 can pronounce a TH now. No one had explained to her before that the "th" is a lisped s, and now she gets things right at least when she's reading. Her speaking is still largely TH-free, but her reading has improved absolutely beautifully. It's weird how people can imitate speech impediments without problems (I made her read an entire page while "lisping"), and then get it right (and made her re-insert the "s"s afterwards), and the level of improvement completely knocked me out.

Dumb: I swear I'm a good, inconspicuous businessdyke when I'm at work. I don't run around all "LOOK AT MAH RAINBOW BRACELET!", but things follow me and I can't help it. I teach three teenage boys on Fridays, they're between twelve and fourteen. ( Today, my students invited me to join their masculinity affirmation ritual. )

Bad: One of my students failed his exam and I don't really know why. He was doing so well, and even though he still has obvious gaps, nothing prepared me for the total wreckage of his last exam; he's not doing himself justice in the content, and the language is all over the place. He can't even bear to look at the paper and he's really demotivated.

Current Mood: tired

One of the learners in my tutoring centre has the most interesting pronunciation. She was reading a text the other day and it took a while for me to figure out what she was talking about.

Oh. And "sought", forgot about that one. I think she was talking about a sword, about which she had thoughts. But I can't be certain.

Current Mood: calm

I've enrolled in one of the arts classes (which are really cheap, they're €25 for 18 sessions) that are offered by Crocky's university for students. I'm looking forward to it, and I'm quite surprised at how much fun drawing is - after my nearly-ten-year-break I didn't really expect it to be anything other than frustrating, slow, and boring, but now, after two months, I'm quite glad I have taken this up as a hobby again.

What I'm especially pleased with is that I am so uninvested in it that learning to improve ought to be painfree - if this were teaching or writing, my ego would get in the way, and I'm really insecure about things I'm invested in and I'd be crushed if I found that I'd made a mistake because it is so, SO important for me to Get Things Right. Since this is drawing and I've only been doing it for two months, I couldn't care less.

Also, Crocky says she'd come along, and I'd love to get to do things with her.

Job-wise, I've filled in my application as an official emergency supply teacher for this summer. I like the sound of that.

I'm going to teach my fidgety students in a room without chairs tomorrow, since they find it so hard to sit still and learn better standing up. I'm curious about how that'll work out - all of them said that when they study at home, they don't do so at their desk but while walking about. I'm curious as to whether this will be applicable to larger groups, too - I know for a fact that part of the reason why some of these kids stop being able to concentrate at some point is because they simply can't sit any longer, and I don't see a disadvantage to having them walk about the room while teaching or have them stand while writing as long as they pay attention. My reading backs this up, too. Should be interesting.

Also, I'm having a lot of fun in the Groups on DA right now, and my day was made when I discovered the picture below, drawn by ~nattherat, the best Worst Witch artist on that site.

Not only does she manage to capture the style of the books perfectly, she's also a fan of Ms Hardbroom AND Drill/Hardbroom.
My day is made.

Current Mood: busy

One of my students hates poetry, she says.

She doesn't want to have anything to do with it, whenever they're faced with poems in class everything about her speaks her dislike. Her body language, her expression, her moans, how she approaches the topic, the way she deals with it. She just doesn't like poetry and frequently expresses intense dislike when confronted with poetry, she's easily confused and frustrated, and doesn't see the point of dealing with it.

At first I thought it was that specific poem, which was admittedly rather obscure and gave them a second one the next lesson. Again, the same reaction. Frustration, lack of understanding of both content or why rhythm is important at all.

And then I gave her a poem in Russian, her native language. I wish I'd had a camera to capture just how quickly she snatched that sheet ouf of my hands, and how hungrily she read those lines, and how eagerly she engaged with the poem, and the translation provided below. She immediately had a plethora of opinions on this poem, too, I've never seen her that engaged with a poem- any text - ever before.

It was clear that this student, homesick, rejecting all things German, would appreciate the inclusion of her native language in class, but I had just never pictured just how much. I hope I can manage to incorporate the student's native language in German classes in future somehow.

Current Mood: happy

Yes, I'm trying to keep myself from thinking about my exam tomorrow. My two youngest students in the tutoring centre are in sixth and seventh grade respectively and they're at the tutoring centre because their written work is poor. Writing is not the most popular task for many kids, and the fact that their lesson is on Friday afternoon, after school does not help. These lively kids are usually very fidgety and find it very hard to concentrate - no wonder, given the fact that they're in the centre for ninety minutes between two and four on after a week of work!

Last week I had one act out an action with the other had to construct a sentence in the tense that he was revising, and all their sleepiness and demotivation went away as if by magic. Earlier, I had them set each other vocab tests on the board in adjacent rooms to give them an excuse to move around, write on the board, and teach each other rather than doing another test in written work.
A few weeks previous, I had them set each other dictations, which is a little too hard for the kid in sixth grade, but surprisingly doable. Spelling games like Scrabble, Boggle and Quiddler adapted for the needs of my students are also really popular and we usually use those during the last ten minutes. They've been known to insist on staying in ten minutes longer just to finish a game, and they do remember the words they used during the game, so that seems to work, but lately, I've been running out of ideas for quick things that are cost-effective with regards to the lesson time they take up.

My youngest student has not only failed their last vocab test, but he's also supposed to learn the irregular verbs - he never does his homework and learning things by heart seems to be nigh impossible for him. When we talked about their vocab learning methods, the younger dude said something along the lines of, "If I ever did learn my vocabulary lists, I'd probably copy them down and learn them by heart." Pwned by conditional II there, kid.
So ever since I heard that they had to study the irregular verbs I've been trying to come up with ways to make this more fun, and I think I might have found something:

Crocky uses this to teach her younger piano students to read sheet music, and I'm thinking of making something similar for irregular verbs. It's just a slightly shinier way of getting him to quiz himself, really, but who can resist a d12 - even if it happens to have irregular verb forms written on it?!
Also, it's a perfect excuse for me to have fun with cardboard, glue, and possibly even adhesive book covering. Other obvious options include crossword puzzles and bingo, but they also involve sitting down, and this at least allows some moving around. I realise it's not that much.

Are there any other way of getting students to improve their vocabulary? I'm quite partial to the vocabulary duel, too, which might still work with their age group, and similar things to make quizzing each other sound more appealing - especially if they involve moving around.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Germany, Hanover

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Stint in Amsterdam at night
13 Reasons Why
Book habit
Freaky Friday
Good things, dumb things, bad things.
German EFL learner homophones
New Hobby
Class without chairs
Poetry in the student's native language > every other kind
Fidgety students

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Entries tagged with teaching

Stint in Amsterdam at night

13 Reasons Why

Book habit

Freaky Friday

Good things, dumb things, bad things.

German EFL learner homophones

New Hobby

Class without chairs

Poetry in the student's native language > every other kind

Fidgety students

Profile

January 2022

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Page Summary

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