TESOL and a few notes

We'll start with the few notes.

1. Hello Kitty is insanely popular here. To the extent that Hello Kitty motorbikes are a fairly common sight in parking lots.

2. Safety? What's safety? Thailand's approach to "safety" is like their approach to traffic laws. Today I witnessed a family of three riding on one motorbike. The child was probably around three or four years old. None of them were wearing helmets.

3. I saw a gigantic rat in the street today. Seriously. This thing was the size of a small cat.

4. 7'eleven, affectionately known as "seven," is ubiquitous. It's like the Starbucks of convenience stores. There is a 7'eleven about once every two blocks. Also, plastic bags are far more prevalent (they bag everything! sometimes separately!) AND there is no such thing as a public trash bin. Forget recycling. And they always give you straws with your drinks. Every. Single. Time. I currently have an unused pile of straws.

Teaching is steadily getting better. We are all learning a lot about language, culture, student psychology, etc. just by teaching. Today for instance I did another team-teaching session (we're learning how to collaborate more effectively). We played a game using question words because I'd noticed that the students had a tendency to mix those up. We wrote questions and answers on strips of paper, but left the question word out so that the students would have to fill it in. We reinforced over and over that who is for people, how is for describing things, where is for places and when is for time. It seemed to work, and we were feeling really great about it. "Good! 'When' is for time," I would say encouragingly. And then, when we had finished that I turned to my colleague and just caught myself before saying "what time is it?" Yeesh.

That's often the challenge with teaching English. You can give a rule, but invariably you're going to have to ask students to break it. On and in for example. When do you use on and when do you use in? That's simple, you're thinking. "On" is when something is on top of something, "in" is when something is inside something. So why then are we "on a train" or "on a plane" but "in a car." If you can give me the rule, I will be eternally grateful. Don't even get me started on at, to, with, which, that or this.

Another thing I'm getting better at is slowing down (but not too much) when I speak and enunciating/separating my words. I'm also more aware of the vocabulary I use when I speak in class and often say things several different ways. This started as an attempt to get my students to understand me, but now I also use it because I think it's good for them to know there are different ways to say the same thing. It's amazing how much you start to notice about your own language when you do this.

Today we were playing a game called "Desert Island" where students are supposed to come up with a list of things that they would want if they were stranded on a desert island. But, before we could do this I had to explain the word "desert." And in doing so I also had to explain the word dessert. When I had explained that "dessert" was a sweet food usually eaten after dinner and "desert" is a place without any water, I again caught myself before saying "desert island." Desert island? You can argue that this is just a shortened form of "deserted island" but does anyone actually say "deserted island"? So after this long explanation about desert and dessert, my colleague caught me and said "and now we're going to play the island game." I imagine that such an abrupt transition from deserts to islands was a bit confusing. :-)

I think my best class so far was yesterday's. I only had two students, but I was teaching solo. They were both a higher level and more confident, so it was a good atmosphere for some more creative games. I had them tell me about football using a diagram. I did a lot of prompting or "eliciting" as it's called in TESOL and it was really rewarding to see them both get into it and try to communicate. I also learned that Thailand has only three seasons ("summer," "winter" and "rainy") and that they call March, April and May "summer." We are going in "winter" right now (I think). The other activity  I was pleased to have success with was a "run-on story." I drew a picture of a man in a boat (this is my default "notes doodle" although I often add a sea monster of some kind. I don't know why. I know. I'm weird.) and had them write a story based on it. They struggled at first but eventually ended up having Jack Sparrow fight a ghost. It was epic.

As a whole I think we're all discovering that they really do know more than they let on. It's just making them feel comfortable, helping them understand and occasionally jogging their memory (jogging their memory - isn't that an odd expression? Also, apparently in Thai you say you are "jumping class" when you "skip class" which sounds weird but when you think about it, skipping is equally strange).

As for TESOL classes, they're going well. For the most part. As I've mentioned, our methods teacher has been particularly helpful. Here's an idea of my schedule. We have class from nine to noon Tuesday through Friday. Tuesdays and Thursdays we also have class from 1:00 to 2:30 in the afternoons. On Friday we have class from 1:00 to 4:00 (and it's my least favorite!) Mondays are reserved for observations. In addition we teach Conversational English classes from 5:00 to 7:00 every evening and I am tutoring a Masters in Theology student on Wednesdays after 7:00. It's full on.

Classes are varied. Methods (basically, how to teach) is twice a week. It's literally saving our butts right now, especially since we don't have library cards yet so we don't have access to any resources. We also have classes in grammar and syntax twice a week. These are my least favorite. It would help if the professor would maybe, I don't know, teach. He seriously just reads out of the book. My favorite quote thus far "I didn't read this beforehand because I wanted to put myself on your level." He doesn't even know the subject matter. Anytime we ask a question he spends ten minutes looking for the answer in the book. I could do that!
But I digress. I think grammar is important. But mylanta. Nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions and prepositions I can handle. I even understand Subject, Verb, Object. But then we get into adverbials and complements, compound-complex sentences, dependent and independent clauses, finite and non-finite clauses, noun clauses, adverbial clauses, phrasal verbs, verb chains... I guess the attitude is that we we'll probably never be teaching this stuff, so it's not important. But I'd like to know as much as I can. Even if I don't use it, I will be able to use my knowledge of it to teach more effectively.

Thursdays we have "corpus and concordancing" in the mornings (although we only have two sessions of this).  The professor seems like he just walked out of a dusty, old British university and while he may not be the most riveting, this class addresses a lot of things I'd never thought about before. "Corpus" in linguistics refers to a set or collection. Concordance is kind of like agreement as I understand it. So these sessions are basically about what constitutes proper or "correct" English, which is hazy. English is, by nature, always growing and changing so these are tricky issues. I won't go into it here but it's kind of thought-provoking, like pretty much everything else I am encountering.

Then we have phonology, which deals with sound and pronunciation. Sooooo interesting! It kind of ties in with singing. Have you ever thought about the difference between the "b" and the "p" sound? The "b" sound is voiced. That's the only difference. I've been having fun teaching my students to pronounce their "th"s and "z" sounds. Imagine a handful of people all standing around going "thhhhh" with their tongues stuck exaggeratedly out of their teeth. Did you know that Japanese babies and American babies have the same ability to distinguish between "L" and "R"? As they grow up, the Americans develop a greater ability while Japanese people lose this ability.

Anyhow, more another time. It's getting late. I'd like to sign off with a video clip. Today in Methods, we were experimenting with an activity somewhat like 20 questions where the group asks yes or no questions to someone with a picture in order to find out what the picture is. We asked our professor if it was a mammal and he said "yes." After a long string of guessing he gave us a hint that it was a bird. Needless to say we did not hesitate to point out that a bird is not a mammal. Anyhow, it made me think of this video that Katie told me she played in one of her Spanish classes. I wanted to share it, but that would be weird, so I will post it here instead.



"That's okay, I've stepped on my J many times."