Paying for the news

I usually get news stories from the internet to use with my conversation classes and also to talk with my students a little in class. I tend to use sites that are outside Brasil mainly because the news sites here feature very little international news stories. There isn’t an English newspaper in Brasil, from what I can gather from asking around, and so the internet sites are great for finding stuff to use. I saw a story recently that some news sites are going to become only pay sites for news, I think it was about newspapers and sites owned by Rupert Murdock. I don’t mind paying for access to news sites but really don’t like the idea of using my credit card at all for anything online. There will always be plenty of websites to get news from but I think all people have a favorite few websites that they like to use a lot   I’m toying with the idea of asking one of my students each class to find something interesting in the news to talk about briefly at the beginning of each class, say for five minutes at the most. The class time is only 60 minutes, but, I think that there will be more than enough time to do this. I’m going to chat with some of the about this and see what they think of the idea. At the least, it’ll bump up their reading and conversation skills in the class to a higher evaluation level   Sometimes I find out things in the news about Brasil on international sites that I didn’t even know about here. One example of this was a campaign about a Brasilian drink called caipirinha, none of my students knew about this and it hadn’t been in the news. I found out from a teacher’s forum posting and followed the link to a site in the UK. When I quizzed my advanced students about the news story, they were surprised as they said it hadn’t been in the news shows hahaha!! It also gave me something to talk about with my conversation class, starting with the effect of alcohol on the lives of teenagers and then fnishing off with a chat about this story to apparently ‘Save the Brasilian caipirinha drink’. I love these bizzare stories to finish off a conversation class, ending on a laugh is always fun

Conversation Class

They told me this evening that I will start giving conversation classes on Sat afternoons, the first class will be this Saturday. I really like giving this class, mainly the students are advanced or MEC students so I have more or less complete freedom as to what material I get to use, what activities, etc. Some of the activities I’ll do I have used before and will just modify them a little for these new students. They haven’t done them before, the modifications are rreally just so I don1t get bored giving them hahaha!! I have a lot of conversation books, from beginners up to MEC and CCAA also have their own conversation material. I used it last semester and it was okay, nice and easy to set up and use and they are based loosely around the CCAA methodology but I like doing different things so these books I’ll use maybe up to 50% of the time and my own for the rest of the time. I like using material about controversial topics as they always give a lot of feedback from students. Some topics tend to give a lost of responses where as others tend to be boring for the students, such as abortion, etc. Romance always gets a laugh, Role play is really nice too and this time I have the added bonus of our video camera to use in the classes too   I’ll probably start the first class with the toilet paper roll activity, its a great warmer and also allows the students to find out a little about one another. I take a fresh roll  of toilet paper and conceal it in a plastic bag somewhere just out of view of the students. Once they are all seated I choose and ask a student to take the bag for me and show everyone whats inside it. Once they have seen the roll I tell them that I want them to take as much toilet paper as they would use normally when they use the bathroom. This leaves them with either a small amount or with the enthusiastic student a handful of toilet paper.Then I ask them to count how many squares of toilet paper they have pulled from the roll. For each square I ask them to tell the rest of the group something about themselves. Its good fun and they get to find out a little about one another. After I ask them to put the toilet paper in the plastic bag so it can be reused. After this, the class is warmed up, happy and ready to start

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

1st day back

Today is the first day of the the new semester, well for the students, that is. I have been back since last week. I have two classes today, TN9 & EPG but only the TN group will go as the others are still traveling as part of their job. They work for Syngenta and are here one day and then I don’t see them for a while. Usually the first class half the class comes so today we might play a game instead of having class and start lessons only on Wednesday night. I have a Taboo game to play with them, advanced groups like this kind of stuff It’ll be my first time of giving these guys class, they were my wife’s group last semester though so I know them all quite well. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, the group is 99% girls. I gave oral tests to some of them and they speak well so we should get along fine.

I wanted to spend the weekend preparing some stuff online for my groups but the radio internet in our city wasn’t working and they only solved the problem this morning. A bit annoying but nothing could be done about it until today. Roberta has a lot of stuff already prepared from last semester so I’ll have a look see whats in her files before I start making any more. She has a knack for worksheets. She loves making them, I like to make them too but she just has the flair for them   I’d really like to try using Yacapaca with my TN6 group, I must try to find the time to get around to setting up some stuff on it. This semester I have more group and less free time at home, plus I’ll try to give some private classes too. I already have material for these classes, both methodology and conversation classes. I’ll try getting students for these at the local uni because a lot of students are taking English letras courses and can’t speak a word of English. It sounds wierd but it is true, they devide the course into people who speak and don’t speak English. They all get the same degree whether they speak or not too, it really is a strange thing :-S  A lot of my old students are studying there so I like going there to catch up with them. Hopefully, I’ll get a group or two from there..