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.

Where does the time go

I just cannot seem to find the time to get online and blog. Times flying with both the school and our private students and by the time I think to get online usually I’m at the time of the day where I need to rest up my leg and all thoughts of blogging quickly vanish hahaha!! This week was worse because both Roberta and I went down with some kind of stomach bug that laid both of us up for a couple of days, but we’re more or less back to normal now. Also Roberta is starting to work on her monograph and as the year progresses my computer time will grow shorter and shorter :-S  Couple this with the constant power failures in the city and blogging becomes a distant dream. Still I get to Twitter a lot so maybe that makes up for it hahahaha!!

This weeks training at Wizard was nice as we found out that this semester there wasn’t a single student asking to be moved to another group or complaining about their course, etc. Nice to know that none of my groups complained too   Although I had spent all the time since I arrived in Brasil working for one franchise and using their methodology, attending many courses, seminars and giving private classes using books requiring a different methodology made it pretty easy to change over to another methodology with no problems. Working for a franchise is nice, you know what you are going to do every day, even if you are going to do something a little different in the class, but, its nice to have your own students with materials completely different too. Teaching private students sharpens your classes a lot, you’re constantly thinking ahead to see what can be done differently or better. Also with private classes you get a lot more freedom to experiment with new ideas, etc. Although I have been giving conversation classes for a long, long time, sometimes people suggest things to me that I am amazed I have never thought of before hahahaha!! This semesters training course at Wizard is based around a twelve week course that revolves a lot around a Jeremy Harmer book and its a lot more fun and interesting than the usual methodology training that I repeated over and over again for the last eight years. I’m sure that they will have methodology training at this school too but nothing can be as bad as the terrible MEC training that I attended last year from the CCAA Rio head office, especially as she asked me to give the rest of the training on the second day because she hadn’t prepared anything  

Last week, Roberta and I started watching a new series on Sky called ‘Flashforward’. It passes two or three times a week so we won’t have to miss any of the show. The basic idea is that everyone in the world faints and their consciousnesses all jump forward to about six months in the future and then people try to figure out why it happened and what if anything they can do about changing the futures they have already seen. It looks like shaping up to be a great new show. Tonight the second show in the series will start at 10pm, the same time as the Oscars will start on TNT, but it won’t matter if we miss the first hour as all the good stuff is always at the end of the Oscars and it will repeat I don’t know how many times over the next few days – plus If we really want to know who wont what we can just look online I wonder if Avatar will really win best pic? I’d like to see something like District 9 win instead…

Online exercises

I was looking at all the stuff I created online over the last six years and although none of this stuff is really usable with my students at Wizard, Roberts can still use them with hers. The only one I can really use with my students will be the prepositions one, everything else will be from scratch. I’m still thinking about how to go around creating the new stuff. I might just have one blog or wiki and run everything from that, instead of having the amount I already have for Roberta’s students. It would make things a lot easier and I wouldn’t need so much time to jump between everything. Maybe I could get the students to edit this one more this time around too   Quizlet is definitely one that I will use and I’m not really sure what will go into it after that. I love online resources, at the other school I couldn’t get any of the other teachers into it though. I might have more success here as they talked about my homemade online resources when I handed in my CV. Maybe some of the other teachers will already have some stuff prepared as well ,that will make it easier to combine everything, will have to see what happens with regards to this.

There will be another training course this Friday. It will still be based around the book they gave us a copy of called ‘How to teach’ by Jeremy Harmer. I already started on this book. Its not so much a book telling people how to give class but instead about how to liven up and make the classes more interesting. I’ll have soon read all of the book, i love to read hahaha!! I am curious to see how the methodology training will be, especially as I can compare it to the disaster I had last year with the donkey from Rio while at the other school. From what I was told its completely different and a lot more two way instead of some jerk standing telling everyone what to do and not paying any attention to what people are saying to her with regards to improvements   Of course, you get these know it alls everywhere, I just wish they didn’t always seem to be where ever I am hahaha!!  I’ll wait and see what Friday brings, all I know for sure is that its definitely going to be fun and interesting

1st day at new school :-D

Today was my first day of giving class at Wizard, the new school I’ll work for this semester. I don’t think they even looked at my CV, they told me that my reputation was more than enough hahahaha!! I hope everything they heard was good   Training for the courses was a breeze, plus over nine years in teaching, not counting the stuff from the UK, made it relatively easy to pick it up. I had always been told that it was translation methodology but I haven’t seen all that much evidence of it, apart from the teacher using L1 with the beginners. My classes are mainly intermediate or advanced as in the other school. Today was mainly warmers and teamwork exercises that I used with my students to build a good bond before methodology started.  Four groups down and one to go   I bumped into quite a few old students from CCAA here, some of them just started their classes today too. Nice as it means that I have some people in the classes I know so makes meeting the new groups for the first time easier   Luckily i have a couple of books full of activities that I have tried out so it was easy to pick out two or three activities to use with my class. I used the following three activities:

1. Toilet Paper warmer
I Took a fresh roll  of toilet paper and concealed it in a plastic bag somewhere just out of view of the students. Once the students were all seated I asked a student to take the bag for me and show everyone what was inside it. Once they had seen the roll I told them that I wanted them to take as much toilet paper as they would use normally when they used the bathroom. This left them with either a small amount or with the enthusiastic student a handful of toilet paper.Then I asked them to count how many squares of toilet paper they had pulled from the roll. For each square I asked them to tell the rest of the group something about themselves. It’s always good fun and they got to find out a little about one another. After I asked them to put the toilet paper in the plastic bag so it can be reused.

2. ‘Just like me’ chorus game
Give the students two strips of paper and ask them to write an affirmative sentence about themselves beginning with the letter ‘I’. Collect the strips and read them out one by one. If the sentence is true for any of the students, they should call out ‘Just like me’.  For example, if the sentence says ‘I like dancing’, the students who like dancing should all chant ‘Just like me’.

3. Drawing blind
prepare two large drawings on sheets of A4 paper. They should be simple and clearly defined.

For the 1st drawing:
Ask for a volunteer and give them a marker pen. Have them face the board and inform them they cannot turn around. Ask the remaining students to give instructions on how to draw the picture, giving vocabulary when needed. After compare the two pictures.

For the 2nd drawing:
Ask for another volunteer. this time, blindfold him/her and repeat the activity as above, comparing the pictures when finished.

Afterwards, compare the two activities, seeing which they thought was easier, harder, if they felt more together as a group helping their teammates to complete the task, etc. To increase the atmosphere/anticipation, you can set a time limit for the students to complete their pictures.