Thursday January 3, 2012

10:30 a.m. at the 7-11 on Chang-An Road

Another rainy and gloomy day here in Taipei. The rain, at least, isn’t pouring down. It’s barely even making the effort to be rain. It’s just trickling a bit here and there. I didn’t even bother to break out an umbrella for the walk from my apartment to here. I was the only one walking umbrella-less, though. Everyone else had one.

I am teaching a set of classes – the last ones in a series of five – at a high school in Sanxia today. I have to leave shortly to meet the sales rep to give me a ride to the school. I hope these classes go well. I have a complete lesson plan and material for them, but I don’t have any confidence in the lesson I’ve planned. After I have a cup of coffee here, I’ll have to go over my lesson plan and make some changes I think. I was lying in bed last night and thinking through one activity I had planned, and as I went through it step by step, I saw problems with it. It’s essentially a game that I designed and it’s intended to get the students practicing making sentences using verbs like “said” “replied” “shouted” and “asked” etc. The idea is for them build up to being able to make up an entire conversation between two people. I realized, though, that any game has to be very simple. I worked out all of the details of the game in my head and I know exactly how the game would work. And it would work. However, one thing I keep forgetting is that I would somehow have to convey to the students the rules of the game and how it would work. And that isn’t so easy to do.

The game would work fine if I were running it for the whole class, but this game was designed for the students to play in groups of seven. So each group would have to understand all the rules. I realized – as I went through it in my head – that I would have a hard time teaching the game to the students. So I think I have to rethink that. It should be okay, though. I think it would be better, anyway, to go straight to the focus of the class, which is to tell a story based on looking at pictures. As our last class, it would be better to actually do that rather than practice just one skill. So I think I will have the students choose pictures – I have a set of them – and then make up a story with conversation for that picture and present it to the class. Perhaps each group can do it separately. It’s just that when the whole class does it together, not enough students get a chance to speak. I’ll have to think about that.

Later (5:30 p.m.)

The classes are over, the last of the classes, and I survived. It’s very hard to judge how these things go and how they seem from the point of view of the students, but everyone seemed more or less happy. I got some very nice compliments from one of the teachers before the class began. She told me that she was very pleased with the job that I had been doing, that the students liked me and my classes, and that I was always very well prepared – that sort of thing. At the end of the classes, she asked me to make sure that I come back to their school next semester. I made my usual excuses about the company doing the scheduling, not me, but she insisted and I promised to tell the company to send me back. Of course, I won’t be here next semester, but I didn’t want to tell her that.

 

Tags: job, Taipei, Taiwan, Thursday January, umbrella