Class pumpkin

One of my colleagues got us some pumpkins from Hokkaido, and we carved them today in my second period class. I only had one class today, and today is Halloween, so before anyone starts shouting "foul..." They had never carved a pumpkin before, so this was a treat. I assigned all of the students to one of three groups. Each group was responsible for one part of the face, the eyes, the nose, and the mouth. Jack-o-lantern by committee. We all had lots of fun. I'd like to get more, but they are very expensive. More than ¥1,000, or about $10, and that's the small size.

class pumpkin Originally uploaded by Yokkaichi 1.

The Korea Herald : English as official language

Wow! Korea's Ministry of education and Human Resources Development is making a move to install English as an official language in three "free economic zones," which are listed as Incheon, Busan-Jinhae, and Gwangyang.

In order to accommodate the change, the ministry says it will start an English immersion program for mandatory education from 2008. That would be a huge undertaking.

As you could imagine there are points that would cause people to argue either way. Some people say that the program will make the country more economically competitive. Others say argue the opposite. There is one quote that I love about making the country stronger economically.

If a nation's level of English skill determines its competitiveness, so goes the argument, the Philippines should have joined the ranks of advanced countries, while Japan should have been dropped from the list of developed nations.

Touche!

Movie activity for upper-intermediate students

Last night in one of the classes that I taught here in the Community College, I put students in pairs and asked them to choose two letters of the alphabet. Then the pair had to use those two letters to make a movie title. For example a team might choose M and T. They could make a movie title like, "Murder Toilet." Then I told them to make up a story line for that movie.

I was really surprised that they spent 30 minutes happily creating. I never thought that they would spend that much time on the project. I had a good time with the group that I worked with, who came up with a the title, "Doctor Carol." A doctor in a big city becomes jaded and goes off to Cambodia to help the people who need and deserve it. She faces many difficulties. Then we started thinking about how the story line would change in different countries. For example, Hollywood would make her fall in love with a great man and live happily ever after. A French film would have her die of a funky disease. A German film would have her never go anywhere and forever wonder about what may have been. The Italian film would be sunny and full of fun, and she would fall in love, but she would die in the end. The Japanese film would have her work in Cambodia and sympathize with the people, and would then return to Japan and forget everything about the people she worked with. The other groups' ideas were great.

Try it in your class if it they could have fun with it.

it's tough being a student

It's really hard being a student. I have a class of repeaters this semester. They are people who haven't passed this particular section of English yet. 99% of the time the reason for that is that they skip so many classes that they can't get the credit, so attendance is that main hurdle. This morning two of the people in my class were here and walking into class when someone crashed into their parked car and two others in the parking lot. This driver then sped off, and in trying to park in another parking space, drove over the parking blocks. I don't know if the driver was drunk, insane, or just a really bad driver, but the result was that my students had to follow this idiot and call the police. Everyone was fine, but they missed class, something they were actually trying to avoid.

I suggested that times like these are why one should maintain good attendance records. I sure hope they show up next time.

CITIZEN-TIMES.com: Make education a privilege instead of a right, and watch student disrespect evaporate

And from the "Asheville Citixen-Times--Voice of the Mountains, " comes an amusing little read. This is from Ashville, North Carolina. I know where that is, because I came from just north and west of there in the same Appalachian Mountains, and I can tell you that they know alot about education, like next to nothing.

In this gem, Doug Williams bemoans the state of education in the US. "There is a growing concern — realization, really — that the United States is falling behind in some important areas." His remedy, toss kids out who are behavior problems and let their parents deal with them. This, he says, will bring schools, "a return to compliance and progress in education." This must mean that if we have a compliant, obdient group of learners, then they will learn and close the gap in science and math.

Then he says, "several years ago a friend from Japan told me that when a teacher in her country enters the classroom, everyone gets quiet, faces to the front, pays complete attention and says not a word unless called upon." Wonder when and where this person went to school. I've been in high school classes where there are some students who do stand, those who are not writing email on their cell phones or who don't have their MP3 players turned up so loud that they didn't hear the teacher come in. And most do face front and say not a word, whether called on or not. The reason they don't talk is because they are asleep after having spent the night standing along a road somewhere cheering on their favorite public annouiance, "bosozoku." Not all students are like this. Some are, but my point is that imagining that Japan is somehow some kind of ideal, a image that grew out of Japan's economic boom years where every nation in the world was trying to figure out what they were doing right, is by no means reality.

Look at the "Third International Mathematics and Science Study." The US wasn't second after Japan in math. We were forth after Japan, Canada, and Russia, and tied with England. In science we were fourth after Japan, England and Canada, and tied with Russia. There are lots of people doing it better than the US. Some of them just next door. When is the US ever going to get a clue and look north for answers, for more than just education, too.

new approach for writing with beginner students

For four-skills classes that are using textbooks, I try to make sure that the learners get a good balance of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and culture. (Ooops, that's five skills.) Yesterday was a writing day for one class, and I had a minor epiphany. Until now I have focused on three areas for development, namely content, organization, and mechanics. That worked moderately well. During the process, which I won't go into right now, I asked them to be aware of each area. That meant that they had to be aware that the content of their writing was complete, that it was constructed in a way that was accessable to the reader. Finally they had to pay attention to the boring stuff like capitalization and punctuation.

Yesterday's class was a group of true beginners. Some of them were starting with ABC's at the beginning of the year, but now they are at the sentence level or beyond. Yesterday's writing task was aimed at those students making the jump to paragraph writing. That's when I decided to use a different set of standards that they could apply to their writing. I suggested that they read through their writing, after having put something on paper, and check for the following:

letters: Are all the letters English ones?
words: Are all the words that you want spelled correctly, and do they mean what they should?
sentences: Are they all sentences? Do the begin with capital letters and end with some puntucation?
paragraph: Is it really a paragraph, or just a list of sentences?

Since they were making the jump to paragraph writing, many of their first drafts were lists of sentences. The have little or no experience writing beyond the word level, really, so it was a challenge to first get the sentences in order, and then build a paragraph.

They did wonderfully, and this checklist seemed to work well for students at this level.