Ranking game -’Victims’

This week I was going to do  role play as part of the conversation class, but one of my students couldn’t make this class this week and asked me to do something else and put off the role play until next week. So this weeks class was about ‘Life and death’ and went down well. The CCAA conversation class books are okay to use but I always have to add a little extra onto the material to make it last the full 90 minutes of class. This weeks class was rounded off with a ranking game that I found in a teaching manual called ‘Victims.’ The main idea of the game is that the groups of students are members of a committee of city elders who have to vote which of five girls is going to be the last member of a group of young people who will be sacrificed to the Minotaur in order to keep the city safe for another year. This list of girls and descriptions given to the students is below:

Chloe – one of six brothers and sisters, family very influential, so children have so far escaped being sent. Chloe is very talented, has won several prizes for singing and music. Engaged to be married to rich businessman who threatens to withdraw financial support from the government is Chloe is sent.

Arete – Only child, mentally retarded but adored by parents. Occasionally violent, once attacked young child through jealously but parents have seen to it that this should not reoccur. Occupies herself with simple sewing jobs.

Charis – Orphan, rather a wild character, has lived on the streets, kept alive through charity and occasional thievery. Has recently come to live with a middle-class family, responding well to affection and teaching; shows signs of exceptional intellect.

Thalia – One of five children, but her brother was sent last year. Thalia was very close to him and wants to be sent, hoping he may still be alive, but her parents are violently opposed to her going. Very popular, an excellent athlete.

Euphro – Eldest if six brothers and sisters, Family is fairly well-off. Ugly, nobody likes her very much as she is intolerant and given to unkind gossip. Mother often ill, so Euphro spends much of her time looking after younger brothers and sisters.

There is no correct answer to this ranking game, only for the students to make their choice as a pair/group and then to justify why they chose that particular person. It’s a little grim but people can always do as the book suggested and tell the students that some Greek hero arrived and slaughtered the Minotaur to save the sacrifices from their deaths. If I get the time, I’ll do this with my MEC students as an extra activity, they love talking so this will be right up their street hahaha!!

Day 3

We started the day by just resting after running around so much the previous days and after lunch we went with Alex to visit the school he works at, CCAA Hauer. I met his students from that afternoons TN9 group and chatted with them for a while. One of them wanted to leave early to go meet up with her secret boyfriend, not sure really what that’s about hahaha!!

Above: Myself with Alex’s students.

Later in the day, once Claudio had finished work, we went to visit Parque Tanguá. It was already getting dark by the time we arrived there but all of the park was lit and the fountains looks spectacular at night. We wanted to go in the daytime later in the week but we didn’t find the time. There is an observation deck that lets you see out over the park complete with a see through floor to view down the the bottom of the waterfall, but at night you cannot really see all that well.

After leaving the park, we went intothe city center to grab something to eat and drink. One nice thing about Curitiba is that you can be out enjoying the nightlife at night in safety. Police are about all night and move on transients so that they aren’t in positions to rob or harrass tourists. Food and drink in bars and restaurants at night aren’t so expensive and if you know someone who lives there they can recommend the best places to go

Vacation

I haven’t posted for a week or so because we traveled to the south of Brasil to visit friends in Curitiba. I’ll post a link later to some photos we hosted in Facebook. While i was there I managed to cut my finger while washing the dishes and ended up having to go to the hospital to get stitches, total nightmare. Also while we were there, we visited CCAA Hauer and spent some time celebrating Teacher’s Day with them at a pizza parlor   Although we were there for a week, we didn’t have time to see everything that we had wanted to, so we will return there next year to pick up where we left off. Places we did visit were the TV tower, the city zoo, a lot of the outside parks dedicated to different things, etc. The city zoo is free and well worth going to visit, you can enter for free and have lunch there during the week. We took some video as well, Roberta and I are going to try editing it and maybe we’ll post some of it online for our students to see. With over 800 photos to choose from we also have to find some to post in our Orkut accounts to share with our students too.

One thing we really loved about Curitiba was the transportation system. It’s probably the best I’ve seen in my life. Nothing in Goias or District Federal comes anywhere close to the one in the city. A single fare gets you into the busses and you can change buses in a system of tubes dotted around the city without paying any extra. On Sundays this costs you only R$1, no matter where you are going in the bus system. In Brasilia this would cost you a small fortune to do. Roberta took some video of the super length buses that the city uses, these buses have their own dedicated bus lanes and this means that travel times around the city are faster than by car. When we were there we saw that many many people leave their cars at home to take advantage of the bus system. It’s a shame that this kind of system will never happen in our city, the bus company that has the monopoly in our city would never permit it   Although Brasilia is the capital of the country, in some ways it is very far behind some of the other states and cities. Hopefully, one day some politicians might travel there to see how a real city should be run, preferably in time for the Olympics in Rio.

Brainstorming

I’ve spent this afternoon trying to keep cool in this intense dry heat we have today in our city and also brainstorm some ideas for a conversation class about advertising for the weekend. The CCAA conversation class book already has a basic class for this subject, but like last weekend I want to increase the amount of activities to make the class last more than an hour. I have been toying with the idea of spreading this class over two weekend, one for advertising itself and the other for deconstructing adverts. The students are mainly high intermediate to MEC but I don’t want the second class to get too complicated and hard for the students to do. I receive English Teaching Forum every three months and they had an article about this and I’ll try to simplify this to use in class. The CCAA book starts off with a basic cartoon but I’ll look for some adverts online that I can download and record to pass throughout the class on the dvd player. Also I’m trying to think of a different way to ewnd the class, last weekend it was a ranking game that worked out rather well. This time I was thinking of having some envelopes containing some questions related to advertising fixed to the whiteboard in some numbered boxes that the students would choose from these to ask the other groups/students. This having the students choose from numbered areas of the board increases the student’s participation and they get a kick out of trying to guess an easy question hahahaha!! I might try to video this is possible and probably post it somewhere where only the students can see it. I’ll ask them about places for this as most of the students love posting their own photos or video online and I’m sure they’ll have some suggestions I also saw a nice lesson plan for a conversation class about making an advert by using an advert. I think this is going to be too much to do in one try, maybe I’ll spread this out and do over the rest of the semester so that the students don’t get bored doing the same thing over and over again.

This month it seems that two of my student in MEC1 have birthdays and one group asked me if they could spend some time near the end of their class to have a little birthday party. This little amount of time they asked for will not be as little as I would want hahahaha!! They are already bringing food and Roberta is going to make some hot dogs for their party. Good thing we live right near the school. I’ll try to get some photos and maybe a video of them singing ‘Happy birthday’ too. I’m saving space in my tummy by not eating anything so I can try all the goodies they are going to bring

1st conversation class – ‘Love’

Man, I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to get online to post anything. The first conversation class was Sat afternoon last week, the main topic was love. At CCAA they have conversation material but it only provides enough activity for 20 mins at the most so to pad it out a little I added some extra stuff. Luckily whenever SBS have a sale or book promotions Roberta and I go there so we have quite a few of the very expensive books they sell and I dug through a few of those to find some thing for conversation class. One nice activity for the start of the class was a personality quiz about romance that I ran through with the students, it wasn’t supposed to be a serious quiz and started the class with a laugh. The main CCAA conversation material was next, for most of the students this was the first time they had even heard the school had material for this and we worked first in pairs and then as a group discussion to find out what the students thought of love and how people thought love and relationships should be. The final part was a ranking game about the qualities of a husband or wife. As luck would have it, the groups just turned out to be adults in one group and teens in the other (there weren’t a lot of students for the first class because the message didn’t get out early enough the classes were starting hahaha!). This meant that after they had finished ranking the qualities from the most to least important we got to see how things were viewed differently by teenagers and adults. The qualities the groups were asked to rank were as following: tolerant, considerate, faithful, affectionate to husband/wife, affectionate to children, hard working, tidy, home-loving, good-looking, rich, thrifty, good lover, and well-educated. It wasn’t surprising that the two groups had very different ideas about what qualities a partner should have, the top five qualities for the teens were

1. good lover
2. affectionate to partner
3. faithful
4. home-loving
5. affectionate to children

The top five qualities for the adults were

1. tolerant
2. faithful
3. well-educated
4. home-loving
5. good lover

This worked out quiet well as it resulted in a discussion of how different the lists were for both groups and why they though the lists were so different Now I just have to think of what topic for this weeks class..

Professor CCAA

Although I’ve been working for CCAA in Brazil since I arrived here, I have never really found a good site for teachers from this franchise. The main CCAA website is really only for franchisers and not teachers or students.  Recently though I have been really interested in a site created by a teacher called Zailda who created an excellent Google Group for CCAA teachers. It’s ran by CCAA teachers for CCAA teachers and provides a lot of support, information, files and material that other teachers have created specifically for lessons, etc. It’s free to join and helps out a lot. I mainly work with advanced or MEC students but also teach EPG and I like having a look to see what extra materials are on in the group. I like posting my own stuff there too, mainly extra activities or conversation materials. Our Spanish teachers were asking me about it and I gave them the links to go look see as I saw quite a few people posting there about Spanish materials. The site provides links to other sites of interest and hosts discussions to help teachers try to solve and problems or queries they have. I really like this site a lot, I just need to try to find a little more time to post things there

Dia do trote

I can’t believe how long its been since I last got the time to post here Very sad, I must try to get a bit more time organized. A new semester and the school has a new director too, things have been busy. Last week was promotional week for the school which meant the teachers visiting the local schools to drum up a few more students. The other day we visited the local public uni here n the city to talk with the letras classes. I think this visit to UEG was a bit of a waste of time though because most students in letras don’t speak a word of English and don’t want to either. For them the degree is just a way to get a public job and knowing that they can teach terrible classes and receive a government salary with all the trappings. They have changed the rules for English teachers since I’ve been in Brazil, such as, having the interview entirely in English which weeds out 99% of the bad ones. But not all public teaching jobs require this and nepotism gets a lot of cousins, brothers, etc jobs in public schools. UEG suffers from this quite a bit. One English teacher last year was given her job by some relative that already works there and her classes were so bad that the students used to email me to ask me things and to get me to help explain things to them because their teacher didn’t have enough knowledge to do it in class. Luckily for the students this teacher only lasted one semester thanks to a change of coordinators but since then the students told me they have had two more that were just as bad. It’s quite sad really that the students are so excited when they find out the have passed the public exam to study for free in the Public uni only to be so sad and depressed a year later at how bad the classes are   I tried to teach there last semester buy didn’t get back to me about this because of some documents they said they needed but some of the students there told me that this wasn’t the case. Some of the students from my wife’s class come to our house so we can help them out with their projects, etc. so at leas they get some decent support from somewhere.

As the title of my post says, this week is Dia de trote. Well, actually its from today till Sat this week. The new director came up with the idea of having the students do something funny or unusual once a month, just for fun. This week is the first time we have tried this at the school and it was decided to do something simple for the first one like wearing Havaianas to class. Most if not all people in Brazil wear some kind of flip flop so this one was easy for the students to do. I’ll take a few photos of my groups completing this task to post in Facebook and Orkut. It’ll be interesting to see what other ideas they come up with for this day

We moved house recently and in the promotion we have been advertizing conversation classes. I have been digging throught all of the boxes for the material we have for this and I came across some books that were packed and had been hidden away for quite some time. I was really pleased I found them because they have many interesting conversation activities I can do with my MEC students that require very little setting up. I’ll have a good look through them over the next few days to see what I can find to use this coming semester with my students. they are mainly teenagers and love doing different things

Business English

I have some new students who work for Syngenta and they are in the beginning of learning Business English with me. The course we teach them is EPG (English for Professionals in General) and as a course its really nice. Full of video and multimedia stuff. I like this course a lot and the students that have studied this all seem to like it a lot too. One real problem with it is a lack of any dedicated online resources, the CCAA homepage is really only there to promote the schools to franchisers and has really very little to offer the students with regards to their courses. While i have a lot of sites online with stuff I’ve created myself for the TN and MEC courses, I have more or less nothing for EPG. I have been looking online to see what I can use with them while I work on getting something set up and running. I love the BBC Wordservice site because it has a Learning Business English section that has a lot of stuff on it but not really anything for total beginners. I was playing with Yacapaca too before the other school crashed out and I’m hoping to try to get some stuff into this for them too. They seem very enthusiastic and I’m sure that anything I create there with this they will defiinately try out. My main problem is really time at the moment, I need 30 hours in a 24 hour day hehehe!! I will try to get some free time online tomorrow in the afternoon and see what I can come up with. I was thinking abouyt maybe getting them to use something simple like Twitter with its very short message system as soon as we have a few lessons under their belts, just so they could try simple messages to each other. I’ll talk with them about this and see how they feel about experimenting with it later on in the semester. I have some sheets that I got from Eslprintables too, man that site is excellent for worksheets and stuff. Roberta loves posting stuff she has ran up on the pc there. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have some ideas for stuff for them. Also my web host has a lot of space left where I can upload some stuff for them too. Maybe it’s time to dust off Hot Potatoes again

New semester

The new semester will start for me next week sothis week was actually pretty busy. Yesterday I had training with some people from Cambridge for the newest of their coursebooks and the day before that was a teachers meeting at CCAA. Since the start of last semester when I started to work for more than one school I haven’t really been having much of a good time working for CCAA, the terrible training a few weeks ago was probably the lowest point of the semester for me. The teachers meeting this week wasn’t really any improvement from this, I didn’t really expect it to be though. My allotment of groups is now at my lowest ever since I started working for the CCAA group 8 years ago, there’s been a lot of asskissing by newer teachers to get more groups and seeing as they suck up to the person who makes the schedule a lot of people have noticed these few getting more and more of the available groups. It’s probable that either me or Roberta will leave this semester to spend more time on other projects. I was only at the school less than an hour and got to hear other teacher’s complaining about the situation there too, but they won’t do anything about it as most of them are only really there to make pin money. As the only native speaker I expexct to get a lot of shit thrown at me and this last semester there was definately a lot of shit hahahaha!! With the Cambridge school all set to start now and the franchiser all set to do some major promo work in the city to give us a boost I’m not really all that worried about what happens during this semester. It’s a little sad though that they let things get so bad As they say, all good things must come to an end…

As I said above, Roberta and I attended a training course that lasted the whole morning with some reps from Cambridge Uni press. They were talking about the new Touchstone coursebook and giving some ideas about how to use the book and stuff. Also they were talking about their website and things that had been added to the Touchstone pages in the Brasilian version of the site. It was a lot of fun and very relaxed, I got to meet some of the other people from the other Cambridge schools too. It turns out that we had missed a Cambridge Day in Brasilia which was shame as I like to attend these events and seminars. The presenters took a list of all emails so we could be added to their database and get mailed when events are going to happen in our areas   I took some time to chat with our franchiser at the end of the meeting about the start of this coming semester and picked up some stuff for the school including Hippo. Hippo is a teachers aid that gets used to work with small children in the Hippo and friends books that we will use this semester from the supplier. He’s actually very cute, I think Roberta would keep him if the had half the chance hehehe!! I’ve never seen a puppet used in a classroom before so this should be interesting, I wonder how the kids will take to him

Online exercises

I’ll start this week to create more online exercises for my Touchstone students. I’ll use the same software as before, Hot Potatoes, Quizlet, etc. I think they will be mainly grammar reviews and stuff as in their last written test this was where they seemed to have problems. To be honest not studying and a small minority who talk all of the time in class probably counted for some bad grades too but it only takes a few minutes run run off the exercises and upload them to the site. After created 400+ exercises and setting up the site making the alterations is very easy. The homepage was created with a Publisher theme so its easy for me to edit and change it and all the main files I don’t have to change, just upload and thats it. I’d like to do more or less the same way I did for my CCAA students, with the Touchstone being beginners though I’ll stick to stuff I know they have a few problems with just for reinforcement. If I get the time I’ll try to upload a few this weekend.

Also I am still trying to find the time to create the podcasts and do something with this, it always gets pushed to the back burner simply because this site isn’t really required as part of my students courses, only as an extra thing that I want to create only for some extra stuff and also for a bit of fun too   I really must find the time to at least start as soon as I get a decent amount of free time.

Our PS2 went on the blink last week and today if we get time we are going to see about getting it repaired. A students father told us about a place in our city that fixes them and we will go see how much it’ll cost to get it up and running again. I like the PS2, I use it at night when Roberta is at the uni to pass the time. We have Guitar Heros 3 and we have never played it hehehe!!