Radical Eclecticity

So, in my first week with the kids I’m doing lessons on time and date. We start with things like the days of the week, how to say the date, how to say the time, talking about tomorrow and yesterday and things like that, and then we wrap up by talking about special days and holidays. Now, it was not until I started planning the holiday lesson that it really hit me: Friday is the 4^th of July!

This made for an interesting teaching point. I mean, yeah, we can simply call July 4^th America’s birthday and that totally works, but I tried to explain that the US was once a part of England, and that we had a war to break away from them and be independent. Suddenly I realized the odd parallels that could easily be made between our historical situation, and current politics is Asia, and I decided it best not to connect those ideas. I did tell them about a student we had at HMS once, though, that didn’t know the US and England had ever had a war because we’re such good allies now. They chuckled, but it might have just been out of politeness. 

Anyway, I should say at this point that I am, in fact, still alive and well. I haven’t posted this week for two reasons. The first is that I’ve never planned lessons that teach English as a foreign language. That process has been a bit more time consuming than I had thought. I’m getting the hang of it now, though, and I have started building my mental plan of the overall flow and structure, and then cranking out the individual classes much more efficiently. All told, I think it’s going well, but I might be giving them too much new material each day. 小季 is monitoring that for me, and said not to change my style until after the first week. He’ll get an idea from the students, and then let me know whether to scale it back, step it up, or keep it about the same.

The second reason is that, for my reading class, this is one of those spiffy double-weeks. See, FOR-PD is a reading course designed by the state of Florida as part of the reading endorsement process. It’s designed to be taught over 14 weeks, but the summer semester at UCF is only 12 weeks long. Thus, on two different weeks we have to do two lessons at once, and this is one of those weeks. My hosts have graciously reduced my time commitments this week to help me adjust, but between my reading class and planning my lessons, I’ve been a bit busy.

All told, though, this has been a great experience. My students rock (students always do), and they’re a lot of fun to work with. I’m not sure if it’s cultural, or just the subject matter, but it seems like these students’ facial expressions are much more transparent than my kids in the US. I can totally tell when they are lost or confused, when they know the word they’re looking for but just can’t find it, and when they’ve got the word but they’re just unsure of how to pronounce it. Hopefully we’ll get to know each other better and better as the class progresses.

I think the time and date lessons are a bit tedious for them, but I wanted to do that at the beginning, so that we could practice it throughout the course as part of the Small-Talk that we start class with. Next week’s lessons on sports, hobbies, action words, and describing things should be a bit more active and cool.