A rolling thread where we are teachers

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.

I've been in the last couple of days setting up the classroom. Well, yesterday I actually just sat at the computer--I need a day to get re-acclimatized to the simple fact of being there. I've been working my way through The World Is Flat over the summer. Made me extra glad I'm a teacher and don't have to worry about "high-value added skills" and all that stuff.

just putting this out there:

http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content/current

is pretty good and I've got an institutional subscription. if any of the articles look interesting to you guys let me know and I could, uhm, share.

thanks!

As a continuing ed instructor, I get paid by the student and I just found out yesterday that I have 23 in my class this term. That's a lot! And, bonus, this is not a writing class so unlike last term when I had to read 24 legal writing assignments every week (omg), I just have to grade 23 midterms and 23 finals.

I had my first class this past Saturday and I have a lot of really interesting students. In a good way! That's one thing I love about continuing ed - my students are v. interesting individuals that I enjoy getting to know.

my teacher ed program started this week. officially freaked out

oh please, you're a natural
stop the freakouts before they start imo

aw <3 means a lot coming from you, Amanda
i think i will maybe just take a nap and calm down

yeah just remember that in order 2 b a good teacher, u have to not freakout, ever

doing responsive classroom stuff today. it is good and all, but kind of... obvious?

sorry but need to vent - hate it when that dude I'm working with from upthread e-mails me about his sessions and says something like "many of the students are not very strong..." (happens all the time)

have you ever thought that you are just not teaching them effectively

also, just turned down a request to write a rec letter. that felt bad. but I honestly think lukewarm rec letters hurt more than help. need to have a range of stock responses stored for next time.

Not much, just fractions to a niece, and it was frigging harder than I ever imagined it would be. Sister-in-law got a laff watching.

I won't write rec letters for everybody either. Some of my students, as much as I might like them personally, are just not very recommendable.

dayo, how did you tell the student that you would not write the letter?

Does anyone happen to know of any EFL schools in London looking for teachers? I've been doing agency work all summer, and it's abruptly dried up.

I sort of hemmed and hawed and told her that she did pretty good work (B to B+ student I would say) but I said that she was very quiet in class, I didn't really notice her contributing during group work, etc - also explained that I could only write her a fair letter, and that would probably hurt her application more than help. not sure if she fully understood. I tried to soften it by saying I would help her look over her application, give her advice on her essays etc. xp

That seems like a nice way to do it!

is there any way we could move this thread to 77 or deindex it or something? i'm getting a little nervous about it.

lalech, twice in the past two weeks our tesol teacher has almost tripped on a cord, and each time i've immediately thought of you and lolled, which probably makes me look mean and/or inappropriate.

hahaha
i insinuate myself into many unusual situations

i have a funny story but i want to wait to post it til the thread is safeguarded
today was full of conflict and crying

i was not the one crying fyi
it's week 3 -- usually someone cries by this point

as soon as the thread is safe i want to hear this story.

can we move it to 77? is that ok? i don't want to exclude anyone...but i am dying to tell this story

it's a good idea. and anyone who isn't on 77 and wants to be just has to ask and they get added so there are no real issues with exclusion.

mod request requested

i'm mad paranoid and love my job* too much to endanger it.

*really, for real i do actually genuinely ENJOY what i do for money

i can tell!

i asked the mod board and they suggested starting a new thread on 77. i'll wait til the morning to start it, and will let you know if/when i do. i would rather have a high level of privacy if we're talking about something that -- for some people -- is be as controversial as teaching.

i don't want to get burned or drowned or blacklisted for this. it's not that the story is so good, it's just that we're dealing with a sensitive subject here.

is be == can be or is, depending on which way i rewrote that sentence like 5x

I just started one FYI

Could someone here send me a 77 invite? I'm not on there yet.

just ask on this thread and a mod will add you.

Request Access to 77 Borad

so I'm confused about one activity that keeps on coming up in my materials. we're practicing listening and I'm supposed to ask them to do a 'pre-listening' activity where they 'predict' the content of the recording before listening, based on the title of the recording, and then try to see if what they predicted matches up with what is said.

is there a pedagogical base for this? does it sound stupid to anybody else? I can't recall doing anything similar at all to this in my language classes in school.

ability to prejudge ilx threads as clusterfucks

ha, i had an exercise yesterday where ss had to predict what an article called "about engineering" would be "about".

i guess maybe it has smthg to do with developing the ability to glean gen ideas from key words in texts where they won't know many of them (wds). same as we've been practicing "skimming" as a skill. just speculating on the intent though, and no idea really if it's at all effective.

so I'm confused about one activity that keeps on coming up in my materials. we're practicing listening and I'm supposed to ask them to do a 'pre-listening' activity where they 'predict' the content of the recording before listening, based on the title of the recording, and then try to see if what they predicted matches up with what is said.

is there a pedagogical base for this? does it sound stupid to anybody else? I can't recall doing anything similar at all to this in my language classes in school.

― dayo, Monday, September 20, 2010 11:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

some of the stuff i'm reading for my teacher ed program suggests doing this. i guess it's to get them in an active reading/listening posture? it is hard for me to imagine not seeming stilted in the classroom, but what do i know?

yeah maybe it's designed to make them more active listeners? idk. the thing is I can't take it for granted what vocab if any my students know about the subjects at hand, and it's rly hard to guess what passage called 'there is no right or wrong answer' is going to be about?

it's a standard thing in esl teaching to ask students to "predict" what something will be "about" -- what they're really doing is making inferences about limited context clues, something we all do without thinking about it. when you see a thread that says "thread where we are teachers" you use your previous understanding of ilx to know that this is a thread for people who are teachers, not a thread where people teach you how to do things. when you see a thread that says "clusterfuck thread" and it's about different kinds of international soft cheese, you realize that you predicted incorrectly. it's just developing that skill to correctly infer what something will be "about." like critical thinking, it's a skill that must be developed.

okay, that makes sense - thanks LL. I'll try to use it more in my next few classes

I'm doing my own social studies this year for the first time in a while. We covered the Beringia Land Bridge Theory yesterday, lead-in to our Native Canadians unit. For the first and last time in my life I was thinking, "You know, I could really use Sarah Palin as a guest lecturer today."

Thursday we were doing the five kingdoms of living things, and I had a girl read "amoeba" off the board as "Obama." I was able to milk that for laughs the rest of the day. "Bacteria" was up there too--if only someone had read that as "Gingrich."

just wanted to share this with all my other ESL teachers, found it through a link from a link that LL originally sent me

http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/

they have a youtube too!

http://www.youtube.com/voalearningenglish

also this story is awesome and uplifting

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/education/28school.html

we're doing something similar at my school!

this is key: “Let me help you,” was a response committee members said they often offered to reluctant colleagues who argued that some requests were too difficult.

Ughh I think I just had my least favourite lesson since I got to the basic-class-control stage 3 years ago: there is a HUGE FUCKING DRILL right outside school and the whole building is shaking? Ughhh I like talking about decimals and all but I just want to put a pillow over my head.

sharing another cool website that I use fairly frequently

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/esl/videos.html

http://eslonthehill.wordpress.com/

lots of good stuff for higher level ESL teaching

Hello,

I was hoping that there may be discussion of How To Write A Teaching Philosophy on this thread, but there is none. How does one compose one of these things?