This is a general update of blather. The other night I had a horrifying dream that I was in a hot apartment, and sleeping, and awoke to see a huge — I’d say four-foot legspan, tip-to-tip — spider descending on a thick line from the ceiling. No possible way it could have gotten into this room that I was dreaming, but I yelped in horror and it ascended and escaped. Then, in dream-time, what felt like about twenty minutes later, another spider descended. This one was furry and striped black and white, and I tried to kill it with a …
Category: teaching in Korea
Worthwhile EFL Geekery
Two rather interesting posts on EFL Geek: Krashen on “English Villages” I Speak No English — The Kids in the Hall have no idea just how realistic this comedy skit is! I keep telling students not to memorize their speeches for classes, and while my Public Speaking class gets it, I keep meeting others who think outright memorization is useful. They often agree it isn’t so useful for becoming more fluent or skilled in using a language in real life, but, you know, it gets them better grades than impromptu speech with errors, so… well, that tells you something about …
EFL Geek: ESL & EFL in Korea – Teacher Dude’s Grill and BBQ
I quite like The Die Hard Lesson plan, which is a lesson plan posted at Teacher Dude’s Grill and BBQ. He explains the inspiration for the lesson plan here. If you check out the comments section to the latter, you’ll see me going on about related lesson plans I’ve used in the past: terrorist plots, terrorist hunting, bank heists, and alien-invasion-planning. Via EFL Geek
Stupid Questions
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a very interesting piece titled There is Such a Thing as a Stupid Question, and while some would think it’s more applicable to a classroom in which students and teacher interact in their shared mother tongue, I disagree. There are, in an EFL classroom, questions that are helpful to students, and questions that hurt students. More importantly, the idea that we can teach students to ask (and answer) the questions that will help them really progress is one I’ve written about before. I feel slightly vindicated seeing it written about in this way by …
Where To Download Movie Trailers
After spending some time looking for a useful video clip with a nerd depicted in it, which was long enough to have students pick out ten physical, verbal, gestural, or other traits that marked a character as a nerd, and realizing this was frankly impossible within the DVDs I have in my own collection, I realized that the perfect medium would be a movie trailer for a film about a nerd. After searching in vain for a long time for a place where I could actually download the trailer files themselves (it’s better not to be dependent on streaming media …
Merry Christmas
This is a short post I’ve forgotten to put up many times over, so now I’m finally doing it. For a long time, one of my most commonly-used sarcastic remarks has been to wish someone Merry Christmas. To those who claim that Koreans don’t get sarcasm, I tender my disagreement. When used sarcastically, most students understand exactly what I am saying. It doesn’t matter what level they are, or what their sense of humor is like. In a low-level class, one’s first use of “Merry Christmas,” in a sarcastic sense never fails to get a round of laughter. I’m sure …
Language Log: O grammar books, O now your virtues show
On Language Log recent mention was made of English teachers in America who think “the” is an adjective. It can be worse, so so much worse. A few days after arriving in Korea, where I was hired expressly to teach English, a co-worker who’d been hired at the same time as me asked what a verb was.
Creating Passionate Users: What can we learn from game developers?
A couple of links on games and how they may link to ESL/EFL teaching: First, an article at Wired on the often overlooked positive effects of gaming. And at Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra asks What can we learn from game developers?. She has some interesting audio files on the subject, and the big winner concept is the idea of using levels to stimulate interest in users (or, for us teachers, students). Interesting, and I think I’ll devote a little thought to it.
Urville, France and Other Imagined Places
Apparently I missed out on the attention that was lavished upon this film about am autistic artist who has created an imaginary city in France. (That link is to a video page. I’m partly posting it so I get a chance to see it on my other PC; it’s not loading well on the laptop so I’ll try at the office.) I found the link on Maureen McHugh’s blog, but apparently boingboing also had a post about it. It triggered for Maureen a post on worldbuilding, which is interesting. I haven’t actually gone on a binge of mapping and worldbuilding …
Red Pen Machete
I spent a lot of time last weekend grading. Okay, not as much as I might have liked, but a lot nonetheless. I have read through, added comments, and graded the Mind Maps of the Advanced writing class, but not yet recorded the grades in my records. I have read through, added comments to, and sorted (but not assigned letter-grades) the Daytime Elementary Writing course’s Mind Maps. I have read through, added comments to, and sorted (but not assigned letter-grades) almost all of the Magazine Demographic/Advertising Analyses in my Media class. I have uploaded to a gallery, but not yet …