Class Journal: Week 12

If you have ever heard the song Zombie by the Cranberries you would think that the song was written for my classes this week.  One of the lines of the song goes like this, "What's in your head?"  That's pretty much is the question going through my head this week as I consider my students.
So how can I explain this vegetative behavior?  At first, I though that it might have something to do with how I was teaching.  (I'll be frank, even though I'm learning a lot, I don't feel like I've had time to prepare my classes properly.)  But as the week limped on it was the same story in all my classes, and I know for a fact that there is no realistic scenario in which I could possibly suck that bad.
So I'm staring to consider some other possibilities.  Is it a general pessimism that students have coming up to the end of the semester?  Are my students under time pressure to cough up assignments?  (I feel them on that.) Or is it simply, the disappointing realization that university life is basically more of the same.  That is the initial excitement over coming to a new place has faded into boredom stemming from the fact that the teaching culture in university is just as banal as in high school... minus "baton based motivation" techniques.  (BBM, yes I just coined that.  You got to site me every time you use that now.)
These students came into class with their affective filters well up.  And I'm starting to realize that it is not enough to avoid interaction that raises a student's affective filters, (because I cannot count on anyone one the university to follow my philosophy) but I have to have a way to find a way to proactively lower that filter every time students come to class.  I shouldn't have to do that, but that is the reality that I face so I'm thinking about how to tackle that problem.

Class Journal: Week 10

This week, I read the readings focused on vocabulary and as it happened, this week's lesson had some good vocabulary exercises.  So I wanted to pay more attention than usual to how students dealt with the new vocab.  As a second objective I also wanted to stop repeating myself as I explained things in class.  (I was reviewing my module 2 assignment class videos and transcripts and I noticed that I keep explaining without first seeing if my initial instructions are understood.  I now believe that students find this more confusing because they have to find meaning in a barrage of words.  It's also probably the reason why some of my students don't listen and just memorize procedures.)

The vocabulary to be introduced were nouns depicting sports and fitness activities.  So the burden of learning these words were fairly low.  The meanings were all direct correlations to my students L1 lexicon.  And dictionaries were not required at all as they were all pretty easy to act out.  The only challenges where related to the verbs they collocate with.  But thankfully, in this case the verbs matched logically (though the L1 versions of the verbs grouped the sports and activities under differing subsets.)  Once I wrote the rule the students pretty much guessed the right verb for random activities I threw out there that weren't in their books.  So in the words of President George W., "Mission accomplished... heh heh heh"

In terms of my secondary goal.  I caught myself slipping into my old habits on a couple of occasions but I found it easier to stop my self once I adjusted my mindset.  Usually, I have a lot of enthusiasm about explaining stuff but this week I just imagined that I didn't give a shit and seemed to work like magic!  Habit flushed!

Class Journal: Week 9, Post-testitis and MIC

This week my students seem to be suffering post-testitis. Attendance was down, and the students who did show up looked like they wished they hadn't. It happens every year, so my goal for this lesson was just to nurse students back into the flow of study in a low key way. I tried to keep activities predictable based on what we have done in the past without introducing new procedures or tasks that would require students to lower their affective filter in order to function; with only one exception.  So I didn't try to push the envelope this week, as students are simply not game.

However, I was very surprised at the performance of my class 7 and 8 who are my Friday group. I got a lot of participation in terms of students volunteering questions and engaging in pair work. I think I'm starting to reap the rewards of the new approach I've been employing this semester. Student are really becoming accustomed to working together and it's taking much less effort now in order to get them moving. I quite pleased with that.

That said, I also noticed something that I haven't noticed before. That is, a lot of my instructions didn't seem to get through when I tried some variations on way I set up some of the production tasks. I was looking for that this week and I found it. The way I execute a task usually follows the same pattern week in and week out and students know this. It never occurred to me before, but yesterday I realized that the fact my students seem to follow my instructions may have less to do with understanding my input and more to do with remembering my procedures. It was an eye opener as I had just assumed they knew what I was talking about because they did what I was expecting them to do. This was clearly evident in one task I asked students to do this week that involved complex instructions. Instead of explaining the instructions like I usually do I asked students to tell me the instructions for the task. They had a hard time comprehending what I wanted them to do, I guess because it was something they didn't expect at all. It didn't follow from any of my usual procedures.

All in all, I think I've got to prepare my MIC techniques for new tasks in advance. I didn't think I needed to this week and got caught flat footed.