The news, or lack of…

I give classes to many different levels of students, all with many different levels of English language. Usually I like to start the class by asking how everyone is, what they did since the last class, if they had exams, went out anywhere, etc. I usually get good feedback from this, especially school parties (because the are allowed to serve alcohol at all school functions and its freely available to underage drinkers). Also I like to ask about the news, anything interesting they have seen in the news, stories from Brasil, etc. This question stumps my students dead, it is as if they have been knocked unconscious by a bolt of lightening. They generally have no answer for this, not even any national news. This week, the President of Brasil negotiated an agreement with Iran over it’s nuclear fuel program, turning him into a high profile international figure, yet my students claimed to know nothing about this. Other news, like the law in the Brasil about making Caipirinha and about a campaign to stop restaurants and pubs selling the national drink made with vodka, my students had similarly never heard of. I really didn’t understand this lack of knowledge about things in the news about their own country, I asked the students to find out something interesting in the news but nothing comes from it. There is no interest at all in news, national or World news. I have Facebook and most of my other online social presence is linked into it, and knowing that a lot of students also use it, I decided to update the links in my Facebook account to show mainly only Brasilian news links, the idea being that my students might see it, feel interested and read it, or even read it because it was a story that might provoke national pride hahaha!! The result of this is still the same, nothing.I think it is so strange that they have this total lack of interest in anything newsworthy. It isn’t just because these stories are in English, local newspapers have stories in them and generally the reaction is the same. Only stories such as a student beating a teacher and putting him in a hospital in our city really get the attention of the students, very strange. I have some ideas to try to get my students a bit more interested in the news and will try some of them out and see what happens.

Internet crazy

I’m a member of many sites, including, Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, Google Groups, etc. Most of my students old and at Wizard are members of these sites so it makes it easy for me to add them all, once I can find them, that is   Also I have this blog here, but I am struggling to find to post to it at the moment. Every time I try to sit in front of a pc to blog, something else comes up and I end up forgetting about it for days, or weeks hahaha!! Twitter I use the most as it takes very little time for me to update and Orkut when I get an email telling me somone has posted something there. Facebook is my main social networking site, Orkut is unheard of by my friends in the UK. I like Facebook the most as it links to every other site I use and I can access them all from the facebook site. Recently a lot of my students asked me if I had a Formspring account so they could add me and post things there. I had seen the links to some of my students Formspring accounts, but had never gone to look at them. Formspring is mainly a site where you go to post questions for your friends to answer, to learn more about you. I signed up for an account so I can try getting my students to post questions there in English for me to reply to, another way for them to practice their English I hope   In Facebook, you can simply add the site and it appears in your profile so that people can just click on the tab and post questions and read replies to other question already posted there. I’ll add the links to my other accounts so that my students can easily find the links and then sit back and see what happens. Hopefully, it will turn out to be something fun to do and I’ll get to discover a little more about my students, to go with the little things they told me about the 1st class in the ‘toilet paper game’ hahahahaha!!

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

Nearly

It’s nearly the end of the semester here, I’ll finally manange to get a little more rest   This week more or less all of the schools are on vacation now so most of the promotion work for our new school will stop for a couple of weeks while we get new leaflets printed up and wait for the schools to reopen. My students are a little late and yesterday made their unit exams with Roberta and I’ll do the oral tests on Monday before their break starts. This afternoon I will give my MEC students their final exams while I’m waiting for Roberta’s class to end. It should be relatively easy for them, its their final exam of their English course and after this they will more than likely move to other cities. I took a few photos of them to add to my Facebook account and also in my Orkut account so they could get copies of the photos for themselves. I’m not really a big fan of Orkut as it’s full of viruses and stuff and I only really use it to send messages to the students. Hopefully they’ll drop in from time to time and visit with us at either one of the schools I’m at now

Next week I’m hoping the new material for the  Cambridge school will arrive. All the children’s material should be here including the puppet that goes with the youngest levels. I think his name is Hippo or something like that and the teachers will use him to help teach class to the youngest students between 3 to 6yrs of age. I’ve never seen a puppet used in English class here so I’m very curious to see how Luiza or Roberta are going to use him in their classes   Also the Spanish material should arrive so we can look through the books. The new tee shirts for the school also started to arrive, we will give them away for the first fifty or so students that register for the new semester. They are very eyecatching, the franchiser designed them and they will be good free publicity for the school. The students from this semester were really interested in getting one of these hehehehe!! The teachers shirts we will design ourselves, there are a few places here in the city that print tee shirts and we will see what they can come up with. Hopefully we will have quite a few students starting next semester, building a language school here always takes time, unless you are the only school   Word should get around this semester and we are hoping in maybe a year that we will start to see significant numbers of students arriving. The material from Cambridge is very good and we are using their newest books so things should be fun next semester.

Web 2.0

I’ve been trying out a lot of Web 2.0 sites for a while now. I really like this idea of using the internet as a tool to teach my English students here in Brasil. My biggest problem here is that most schools in Brasil only really teach stuff that is geared to towards the vestibular (uni entrance exam) and most of the stuff they actually teach will never get used for anything or by anyone if they manage to get into either a public or private uni here. Also a lot of teachers here have this fear or laziness of anything new. Sadly a lot of them are just in it for the salary, nothing else. I have a lot of websites online that I created for my students, seven or eight wikis as well as a site that hosts exercises and stuff for my students to use. Some of my favorite Web 2.0 sites that I use a lot are:

1. Wikispaces - I really like this site a lot. 90% or more of my sites online are created using this website. Its fast and easy to use, you need just some basic word processing skills and the registration and setup is easy. They have a good help section and forum too. An email sent out gives a lot of information about new features in the site. I use the free version of it and have no complaints, a few more themes would be nice though but other than that Wikispaces is great.

2. Classroom20 – I like this site a lot, its run by teacher for teachers. It has a lot of postings about Web 2.0 stuff on it. I heard about sites there I’d never heard of before. If you’re a teacher its well worth joining. It has it’s own wikis related to different parts of the site as well as members posting some of their wiki addresses.

3. Twitter - This site is pretty new to me but it is very addictive. You can use it as a messaging service, sort of sms for the web. You post messages about what you are doing at that particular moment and get to read what everyone else is doing at the same time. There are some nice firefox addons for this site so you can read and post without having to go to the site and log in. I use Twitbin a lot.

4. Orkut - A popular social-networking site here in Brasil owned by Google. Its full of links to viruses and stuff but almost all of my students use it. I mainly use this just to send messages to remind them of things or wish them Happy Birthday. I have Myspace and Facebook too but I don’t use them very often, I don’t have the time hahaha!!

There are others I use and I’ll list them here when I get a little more free time