Self helpers

Yesterday we had to suffer watching one of those videos made by some self-help guy. It was terrible, probably the worst one I have ever seen in my life hahaha!! He droned on, making these stupid voices on and off all the way through the first hour, I was amazed that someone actually paid to see this guy. I think they were probably after some kind of certificate with the amount of hours they spent there being tortured printed on it to show to their bosses. In typical Brasilian fashion, mid way through the slow sad weepy music started and he comes out with a story about some boy with no arms, and, seeing as its being filmed, you get close up shots of women pretending to be crying just because they know for sure they will be on the video. Their acting was so bad that they would’ve immediately qualified as a soap opera actress. Sadly we will have to suffer the other half of the video   I’ll miss some of it though as my students are coming to class, merciful thanks for review 2 hahahaha!! This guy didn’t really have anything useful to say, mainly that to be successful you need to have a lot of money and pretend to care about poor people so that people believe that you are some kind of saint. Him quoting Jack Walsh did little to liven up or improve his presentation either. I could’ve been doing something useful like correcting my students exercises and homework I’ll take a book to pass the time during the second half showing, there is only so much that a sane person can take before their brains get fried.

Today, I also spent some time prepping some tests for my Sat student. Although we are burning through the Touchstone book at a fair speed, we haven’t done any of the unit tests. So, this afternoon before going to give class, I ran around the corner to the xerox store go get them all run off. Although my student has been doing photocopies that we already had prepared, the ones that goe with the book are nice as they are graded and it’ll give him a good idea how he is progressing and what he needs to read up on at home from the earlier units. I like the cds that come with the students book, but it only contains some of the audio tracks from the lessons, to solve this problem, I gave him a copy of all three of the teachers audio cds so that he can listen and practice with everything at home. It only requires that I give him the track number for the relevant cd so that he can jump straight to the track without having to search around for each one. Once he gets his laptop, he’ll be able to take advantage of the books online portal, complete with interactive activities for practice using the vocabulary and grammar from the units I just have to pick up the workbook copies for the next class.

New students

I had a new private student start today, he was previously a CCAA student but became disillusioned with the school and decided he would rather just have private classes with me or Roberta instead. He had already seen the material we use and decided he wanted to use Touchstone instead of Interchange, for us this is great as we already have all the books, cds, etc. ready to go, as well as the extra material I have from the Serve Bem girls   He was telling us that he has other people who want to join his group too and that he’ll get them to come visit us next week to chat about the classes, materials, and also about the TOEIC exam. I like private classes a lot as I get more free time to try out different things with the students. As our newest student has already studied before the first few classes were mainly review and passing through earlier lessons from the book so that he could pick up the new vocabulary, expressions, etc. That way he got to warm up with the easy stuff he already knew before moving on to the lessons with words, grammar, and expressions that he hadn’t yet encountered. I like both Touchstone and Interchange as they are both popular books, have a lot of extra material available for them from CUP, have a dedicated website with activities created solely for lessons from the books, and there are a lot of sites that people have created with materials freely available to download if needed. Both of the books have a lot of conversation sections, for me this is great because being a native it gives my students the chance to practice their spoken English with me on a one to one basis. Using the online material requires that our internet is running properly, sometimes at the weekend it is so overloaded with users that it loads pages so slowly but to get around this I might create some Hot Potatoes exercises that can run independently on our pc. Also my students can copy them to their pen drives and take them home to use. I must try to find the time to get around to creating the blog/wiki I want to try using with my Wizard students and them I can create a offshoot for my private classes from this. What we really need is two computers instead of sharing this one but I’ll wait till the end of the year and then see about getting a notebook as its easier to lug around and take with me to classes. Need to get Roberta’s monograph out of the way first.

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!!

Extra online activities

I was giving conversation class this afternoon and after the class decided to have a look through the Touchstone book and see if I could get a few extra exercises made up in the time I had left waiting for Roberta’s TN8 class to end. I got three or four of them done quickly in Quizlet but I want to create some more at home using with Quizmaker or Hot Potatoes. The exercises weren’t heavy stuff, just for the beginners to try out such as: contractions of the verb to ‘be’, numbers, formal greetings, etc. I need a place to put the links and although I have many spaces at Wikispaces, I thought I might try out Pbwiki to see how their Pbwiki 2.0 upgrade is. I really liked the look of their new stuff and would like to try it out just to see how it all works and the Touchstone stuff looks like a nice way to try it out. I’m waiting for one of the other Cambridge teachers to email me to see what kinds of Web 2.0 stuff he uses and to see if he might feel like uploading some stuff and posting the links in a wiki too. It would be nice to have someone to work on some exercises and other stuff that also uses the same Cambridge books as I do. I’ll have a quick play with Pbwiki and see whats what later on before I watch ‘Penelope’ with Roberta.

New classes…

I will also teach at a new school in our city this semester called Cambridge. It’s a different methodology than the one I’m used to, the CCAA stuff is mainly audio visual and the Cambridge stuff is Books, white board, and whatever I create to make the lessons. The book I am teaching this semester there is called Touchstone, I’ve never heard of it before but it’s full of all kinds of stuff. The teachers book is for a whole semester and has a shitload of cds that come with it. I roamed around their website and found that had some free online exercises that weren’t mentioned in either the student or teacher books. I spent some time playing around with them to see how it all works, its quite nice The first class the books hadn’t arrived even though they said they wouldn’t so it was a bit crap as I hadn’t planned on this happening and had to wait 30mins for photocopies Yesterday’s class was well prepared, Roberta gave me a hand to knock some stuff up and I had some extra stuff just in case but all was well as the books had arrived. Most of my students are youngsters and teens in this group. It’ll be a fun semester I’ll post a group photo as soon as I can