Monday, November 21, 2005

Well, I'm sold on this English teaching method. It's incredible. It just teaches itself. I'm just following the book pretty much. If you wanted to actually follow it verbatim there's even a "script" for each lesson. I'm not really doing that though. Now if I only had a decent amount of time to teach English.

It's pretty amazing that I only have about an hour to teach English, writing and spelling. How they expect me to really teach them all they need to know in that amount of time is beyond me.

Today I read another Chris Van Allsburg book the class. This one is called The Wretched Stone.
It's really a good metaphor for the television. Basically it's about this crew of men on a ship who come to a mysterious island with lush vegetation but no fruit growing, a sweet smell that soon begins to stink and water that is too bitter to drink. They find a big rock there that has one part that is "As smooth as glass" and has a light emitting from it. The crew takes it aboard ship and becomes obsessed with it. They sit around staring at it all day (They'd previously spent their time reading, telling stories and playing music) and become so obsessed that they don't man the ship anymore. Anyway..it goes on and they turn into dumb apes. At the very end I asked some leading questions that got the kids to realize that the rock is a metaphor for television and they spent a lot of time trying to argue the benefits of sitting around for hours watching TV or playing video games. I didn't tell them how much time I spend writing this blog, surfing the net and playing video games. That's right, I'm a "damned, dirty" hypocrite. I haven't turned into an ape yet though.

I had the vice principal pop in for a surprise observation today. It went ok I think.

I was running a "zero tolerance for excessive talking during teaching time" day today. We had a lot of names on the board at the end of the day but I think if I stick with it those will decline. I need to stick strictly with it so hopefully they'll grow accustomed to it. That's one thing abou this new English method..it's good but it has some chants/songs and the kids will go berserk if you don't keep a lid on it before and after they say them.

Later.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home