Edited Class Notes I

The whole class were ten minutes late. I heard them outside chatting and laughing. I didn’t say anything, but marked them late.

We worked on explaining the curriculum, using a worksheet I’d prepared.

The teabreak stretched out to half an hour. Again, they were outside the classroom, but I did not try to round them up because the ill-feeling and resentment this causes is counter-productive.

We then worked on the background to their writing assignment. This is based on the City and Guilds’ descriptor, “I can write descriptions of personally significant events, people or experiences.” They have had and easy time so far regarding homework, and the plan is to get them up to speed by breaking this descriptor into three tasks over the course of the week. The first one, given out today and due back tomorrow is: Write a description of a personally significant event.

Festa objected that we had not used the book all day. I’ll spend much of tomorrow with it to ease his anxiety.

Another source of anxiety is error correction. Both Young Gomez and Old Gomez told me during this lesson that I “must tell them when they make mistakes”. I had thought of telling them that error-correction has produced thousands of academic words, but instead I’ll do a ten minute lesson on the point[1].

NB: I'm going to start blogging the notes I write about the classes I teach. They are edited for anonymity. I've started to write these as part of my lesson prep this week for several reasons:

Professional: To give me a space to reflect on the learning that has been, and should be taking place. To identify problems. To make a note of agreements and learner requests in the classroom.

Academic: This class will hopefully yield a Second Language Acquisition research paper for my MA, and this is part of the data collection process.

Arse-covering: I am acutely aware that failing students often blame their teacher, and I'm trying to paint a round unvarnished and contemporaneous picture of the class day by day, should it prove necessary in the future for the purposes of a what-the-fuck-went-wrong? managerial post mortem. Inshallah, this self-preservation motive will prove unnecessary. The need to arse-cover notwithstanding, I hope I'm being honest and objective.

Finally, I should like to explain that my rather unkind nicknames for several of the students are a common teaching phenomenon, a bit like picturing the office bully in his bath: a humorous psychological safety valve. I'd be mortified if they or anyone else put two and two together. This is an anonymous blog after all.

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[1] After talking it over with DJ, will instead use a notebook to overtly mark down any errors, and set aside ten (?) mins at end of lesson.