Hard at it planning TV shows

New semester

These guys were really cheerful on our second day.

Great to catch Jason renshaw's talk about his program in Australia.

It made me remember a few sessions I sat in discussing teaching in Korea  with Jeff Lebow and newfangled technology like what the Korea bridge team was all about.  I remember talking with Dave Cormier at KAIST and he even let me host a webpage on his server.  It was great playing with Cascading Style sheets.  I got some tips from David Deeds.  I was the webmaster at Kotesol many years ago but they have moved past what I worked on.

Guess I am just looking around and wondering what career I can fall into when I get back to Ottawa.  Better do what I can to prepare.

Today I snapped a few pics at a class I am doing for some government workers.

Here we have two learners acting out a should skit they made whee the woman on the table is calm and content to stay home and the woman standing is trying to bully her into going out.

These faces were fun.  I started but explaining we would look at expressing emotion.  What does happy look like?  How do you know if someone is sad?

In teams of 2 they picked 2 emotions to demonstrate in a scene.

The woman on the left was very animated.  Great expression.

It was hard to be serious sometimes but great to show what makes people feel the way they do.

I encouraged them to give specific details and reasons for why someone would feel a certain way.  What makes you angry?  

They liked writing their own situations and learned from watching the other ones.  We did faces then scripts then switched partners and tried a different list of emotions.

I printed enough copies last week but one guy lost his and just took a picture of it to use.  Smart.

What started as a nice idea for the students to practice their English took off as an investigation into the music that shaped my tastes and ended up being a look back at bands that influenced me and I wanted to share.  I did adjust week by week and kept a very organic flow connecting one genre to the next.

We looked at a couple popular shows and analysed what made them "good"  we had the students explain what shows they saw and we looked at scenes, scripts, characters.  I would have liked to have the students make more of their own material to act out themselves but membership was kind of unstable.

Toefl

Started teaching monday and wednesdays.

sequential art

the comic book story and art in the book is crap but at least I love the idea of getting students to make their own.  So I had them draw 3 panels as a group and then I gave the beginning of a story to another team to finish.  Best activity all year.  This class was really creative.

This group really is one of my favorites.    Too many chairs but what are you going to do?

Future

I like talking about the future with students.  How certain they are of something happening.  How we base our prediction on past events and how we try to follow in the path of a successful person hoping to be successful ourselves.  A few of my students are a little low for this philosophy though and when I was eliciting some ideas my first student's response of "SOLDIER" told me that the grammar and nuances of probably, might and "I'm going to +V"  was way over their heads. 

I like to draw out a timeline to encourage them to say when in the future and go a little farther than "after class".  Although in one class " I will hit him after class"  was funny as a girl said it about a big judo major and the next girl said she would kick him.  Really funny class.

Going to may be used for a plan but I had students saying stuff like "going to home after class"  LOL.