Oh my God, I’ve got to stop submitting questions to our Friday Five: My question for this week turns to Time Travel again, but this time, it’s a Connie Willis sort. In her novels, characters often return to some time period in the past in order to do research; time travelers are very often historians, and archeologists have been rendered all but obsolete. If you were able to propose five such trips, assuming that one would work and that you would have to go and actually live in that time period, researching it and studying it for up to a …
Month: September 2004
Reading and Reading and Reading Some More
I’ve been reading a lot lately, but haven’t had much of a chance to post about any of it, so this is going to be a mass posting about several books I’ve read lately. (As in, during the past few months, the ones that come to mind only.) Okay, let’s see. First in importance come two graphic novels I’ve read in French: Paul a un travail d’été, by Michel Rabagliati, and Volume 1 of Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. […and here’s an odd note: both of the authors’ names begin and end with the same letter. Hmmm.] The two graphic novels …
Description Exercise
Another ESL teaching aid: A description exercise for use with lower-level students. This one’s for kids. And here’s a template for a board game. You just need to write “Start” at one end and “Finish” at the other, and then fill the squares with whatever information you want students to get from, or tell to, their partners. You can use this in many ways: write a word and have students use the word in a sentence; write a requested piece of information that you want students to ask their partners for (“Father’s name”, for example), or write instructions for advanced …
Long long day…
Today’s a rather long day. I started teaching at 8:30 am, and I will be teaching until 7pm. That’s because I took on an extra two hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, teaching English at a high school. The kids there are good, so it’s not a chore, but it does mean preparing more exercises and so on. I’ll do that after my writing class finishes, I think. I wish I’d thought to bring dice with me today. Ah well… we can use coins for the board game I will give the kids. But I think I shall have to turn …
Another Week, Another Handout
Yes, it’s that time again. This week’s pair of handouts (one page for Wednesday, one for Thursday) for my writing class is focused on using Question-and-Answer format as a way of organizing their writing and giving them one more style tool for their writing toolkit. The level’s a little high in the handout, but I am making the kind of handout I’d give to a writing class back home. It’s easier to simplify things verbally than to make them more complex, and the level in the class is a little uneven, so I’m trying to include something for the highest-level …