Today's Class is Brought to you by the Letter 'W'

This semester in class I've been doing a number of things differently then last semester. Some of this is made possible by my students being just generally better than the ones I had last semester. They do what I say with more easily, talk very little when I'm talking, and just generally give more effort. This semester I've been focusing more on group activity's of various kinds. For example I might have them sit in rows facing one another and then give each two person group something to talk about like, would they rather have air conditioning in their rooms or a computer, hint the computer won in a landslide. After about three of four minutes I'd stop them and pick some people to have them tell me about what they were talking about. If any discussions come out of this I'd pursue it for a few minutes before going to the next topic. Then I'd have half the class move one desk down so that the groups would change up. It can create problems if people just spend all their time with the same little group. The students are generally pretty good about speaking only in English and stay mostly on topic. It can actually be pretty hard to hear exactly what people are saying some times since when everyone talking it creates a pretty loud din.

I've actually used various thing to create random groups. For large groups I just count off and have them sit with people of the same number. I can usually catch if they try to just sit with their friends. For smaller groups I have to get more creative. I had them line up once from oldest to youngest then pair every three of them into a group. I've also been revisiting some of the games and activities I liked a lot from last semester like having them preform scenes from movies. Ghost must have been on TV recently since I got no less then eight out of 30 groups doing it. It's very odd to see Whoopi Goldberg's role portrayed by a 60 pound Chinese girl. Not every thing I try works exactly. Boggle didn't go over so well since they were just able to come up with too many words to go over in a short time, also they kept trying to add words after the time had expired. I assigned them a project of coming up with a game for teaching English, they are education students after all and most of them will be teachers. It'll be interesting to see how that goes. I also have been much more on top of taking attendance every class. Even if I see that everyone is there it gives me a chance to go over the names as well as ask them to say something. I tend to write a letter, or group of letters, on the board and have everyone say a word beginning with that letter. I sometimes say "This class is brought to you by the letter ..." but I think I'm the only one who gets it.

Sometimes the students want to change their names but they tend to be way to shy to say anything about it. I only just found out yesterday that the student I'd been calling Nimo wanted to be called Rainbow instead. That's always the biggest problem with any Chinese students though is how shy they are. In my class that's going to England I've been trying to teach them how to write a paper after seeing how dismal most of the papers were. I told them to try and write short direct sentences, but they tell me their Chinese teachers give the opposite advice. "It will show our mastery of English" they say. That's my problem, they don't have a mastery of English writing longer sentences only draws attention to that fact. They also complain a lot about relatively short papers when I can bet they'll have to be writing a lot more next year. Honestly I'll be surprised if more than three make it. In fact even three could be a stretch. Sometimes that class seems like it just like a bus heading directly for a brick wall. I keep mentioning the wall but no one wants to get off. My only concern is that I seem to be driving the bus. I gave them another paper due next week, and I'll see how many even actually do it.