A rolling thread where we are teachers

i lived! i think it was among my best first-classes ever. i gave good examples and tied everything together by the end of class and led right up to their homework. i love teaching.

now i am eating a salad that smells a little old/off but i am eating it anyway because the only other food i have here is a package of ry-crisps and some stale graham crackers. (file under: sad contents of teacher's desk)

Awesome! High five!!!

er about the class, not about your sad lunch.

xposts to trayce

i'm doing spec ed math, so ken keeler will be a bit inappropriate for their current level understanding, but i am going to find a way to throw futurama in there (thinkin the wall street episode, the montage where they go down different streets, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, πth street...where does pi go on the number line, BOOYAAAAA)

Yess :D

dyao – sucks. i'm not able to move into my new place until (9/1), and i'm teaching full time beginning next week (8/30) and the movers are charging me nearly $800 to move 3 miles.

that sucks remy. I schlepped my fridge (not a big one but still reasonably large) across town yesterday, was not fun. I'm moving my flat piece by piece, lucky in that I have an office to serve as a intermediary stop. hopefully will get done by the weekend. your movers sound like highway robbers!

got teaching materials yesterday for a class that starts monday. still no word on teaching materials for my other class which starts wednesday. found out for that class, it's only going to be and this other guy who's the course coordinator. he's the dude who basically plagiarized teaching materials from the web for this same course last year without giving credit, who was always late in distributing course materials, completely changed the nature of the final exam and basically screwed over the students. looking forward to a fun semester working with this dude.

Just found out today that I'm teaching an 8th grade class of boys a lit semester themed around Survival that is including at the very least "Alive" and "Into Thin Air."

a nickel will get you a dime that lord of the flies is on the syllabus. yeah?

oh yes, most definitely

Good job LL! I'm always so nervous about first class back - it seems such a leap to go from 'not having taught for 2 months' to "I expect your unconditional loyalty and devotion starting RIGHT NOW - ps we are studyin' numbers" - like, I know I can do it, but it seems like a kind of magic that I always expect to be exposed in!

oh
my
GOD

i just tripped over some cords and fell flat on my belly in front of my speech class -- it was like slow-mo
as i did this, i squealed WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
did not get injured, unless you consider loss of cred an injury

sweet jesus

once I taught for a full hour without realizing my fly was open. :o

hole in the back of my pants on the day i wore my lucky elephant boxer shorts (in fifth grade class)

First assignments distributed this week.

Oh -- I'm an adjunct professor of English.

Ok so I'm finally home now. In my final piece of inspiration to my speech class, did I implore my (adult) students to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and continue if they fall down during their speeches?

You know I did. It's a corny teacher moment, but they seemed to like it. I don't have any native speakers in this class, so that makes it a little more fun. Ah well.

aw, I bet your students aren't even going to remember this accident a month from now.

from the advice of a colleague, created a separate facebook account for interacting w/ students with. think it might be a useful way to convey information about due dates, requirements, etc. & maybe an interesting alternative to e-mail.

oh, i meant to tell you -- the merriam webster's learner's dictionary website is fantastic. they have a blog with posts that should be interesting to students of your level, word of the day, pronunciation exercises, a place to create your own dictionary, all kinds of neat stuff. i think they recently made it a lot different/better. also recommended: visual thesaurus (dot com). great for vocabulary, words with two different definitions that are 2+ parts of speech, demonstrating language shit in an interesting way, etc.

wow, thanks for the tip! going to check it out right now

:) my pleasure

my coordinator just came by and dropped off the materials, still crappy, still plagiarized. \(O_o)/

oh yeah while I was showing him my iPad he made a joke about "don't show me all the porn I know you've got on there!"

...

way to project, loser

(him, not you)

hah - also word on the street is he's dating a 25 year old who used to be a student (not sure if she was his student specifically or not) at his last university. on facebook they are 'engaged.' he is 45.

he is giving all of us a bad name

i'm taking tesol classes at the moment. teaching english has always appealed to me so i decided to give it a try. i like reading you people's posts about it.

oh! wonderful -- you will salvage our collective reputation if anyone can.
if you have any questions, i'd be glad to answer them :)

LL, that was a Good Save! I think the only way to recover from those kinds of events is to be self-deprecating and corny.

amanda is the bestest tesol teacher btw

awww <3
certainly the clumsiest

i'm feeling really unusually motivated this semester. it feels good!

aw thanks, ll, i'm sure i will have questions as i go along.

first two classes went okay on Monday, another one today...

the course packet for the above mentioned plagiarized course is pretty lol.. I can pretty much take a sentence from any page in the packet, google it, and find the original source...

that is super lame
would not pass for student work, don't see why it would pass for administration?

today in my class we were talking about how new words are born, and it was really fun
i love my job

yeah. I dunno, my school uses TFQ (teaching feedback questionnaires) as its primary way to evaluate teachers, and it kind of sucks - you just need to entertain the students & get them to like you in order to keep your job (which is what this guy does). stanley fish wrote some good oped pieces earlier this summer about the drawbacks of using TFQs as primary evaluation devices.

it all depends on how they're written, imo. sometimes they can elicit better information, sometimes not.

yeah, I def agree they can be valuable, but I don't like the idea of basing hiring decisions on them (sorry should have mentioned that in my post - my school basically decides whether to hire or fire you based on how good your TFQ is)

also, grammar question for all the ESL/EFL teachers itt: I'm working on teaching comparisons and comparative structures right now. the grammar book mentions that with adverbs that end in -ly, you need to use the 'more X-ly' construction. i.e. more slowly, more brusquely, more sharply (examples from the book). however what's the difference in meaning between:

John works more slowly than Peter does
John works slower than Peter does

to my ear, both of those sentences sound the same? whereas with the following two

Bill dresses more sharply than Adam does
Eric dresses sharper than Rick

the second example definitely does sound a bit off.

has anybody here used Blackboard? My school just switched from WebCT to Blackboard and I'm wondering if I want to get hot n heavy with this software and use it for setting up email groups so students can read each other's weekly response papers to the reading. Thoughts?

our school uses Blackboard, and my university used blackboard too. you can set up discussion forums on blackboard. for one of my classes we did something similar to what you're suggesting - everybody posted their weekly response on blackboard. but I don't know how many of the students actually read the other students' responses.

it seems really powerful and flexible, I just don't want to "bet the farm" on having students submit lots of content to it if they're not likely to look at it / use it. But I can see the advantages in terms of messaging people about course related stuff.

teachers at my school don't really seem to know how to use it, they just use it as a storage place for all their course files.

anyways, I've answered my own question upthread - the book was just describing tendencies for choosing between the -er and the 'more' form, there is a great degree of flexibility in choosing. ugh english is so hard to teach

has anybody here used Blackboard? My school just switched from WebCT to Blackboard and I'm wondering if I want to get hot n heavy with this software and use it for setting up email groups so students can read each other's weekly response papers to the reading. Thoughts?

Blackboard is terrible software for stupid technophobes.

Personally, I'm phobic about wasting my student's time and energy, and my own time and energy. I make no claims to be a code-writing fiend, but that hardly makes me a technophobe. Kind of busy with the content of the course (an upper division seminar for undergrads on Edmund Spenser which asks them to read all of "The Faerie Queene"). Just trying to talk to other teachers about whether they've enjoyed using this software. Oh, and are all technophobes stupid? Or are there some people who happen to be both technophobes and stupid? And in either case, are you actually accusing me of being a stupid technophobe, or just claiming that anyone who is skeptical/curious about a new piece of software's utility in the classroom is a stupid technophobe?

John works more slowly than Peter does
John works slower than Peter does

to my ear, both of those sentences sound the same? whereas with the following two

Bill dresses more sharply than Adam does
Eric dresses sharper than Rick

the second example definitely does sound a bit off.

as i read it: prescriptively, the second sentence in each pair is technically inaccurate. one of them sounds more inaccurate to your native-speaking ear because descriptively, people do say that. less so the second example. but in terms of language teaching, which is usually done somewhat prescriptively so as to avoid serious confusion, i would say go with the more + adverb formula. it's safe, and students are not going to benefit as much from what flies descriptively. imo, of course.

i would be thrilled to use blackboard, as most of my students are technophobes. instead, we have moodle.

thanks LL, that sounds about right.

I'll probably use Blackboard next term, at least as a place to house documents and links. We used it when I was in law school and I hated it, but it's all we got.

Also, a lot of my students don't have easy access to computers and I don't want to make their grades dependent on their being able to get to a computer lab at school. Just getting them to type their assignments in legal writing was like pulling teeth.