Every week, I have two conversation
courses with different groups at the same company. The groups are
about the same level and they use the same material, but due to a
Holiday-Monday heavy month, the Thursday group is about 2 weeks ahead
of the Monday group. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but there
is a possibility that the courses will be combined because of
attendance issues, so it's important to get them both on the same
track.
For this reason, I've had a little
leeway lately with the Thursday group, and I tried out an activity
based on the “Up and Down” activity on page 40 of Teaching
Unplugged. Basically, it's an activity where the students draw a
chart depicting the high-points and low-point of their weeks. I did
mine first on the board, in front of the class to model it. Then, the
students generated their own, and one-by-one, came to the front of
the class to plot their lines on the same chart as mine.
The activity went over way better than
I thought it would. I encouraged the students to ask questions, but
they really were interested in each other, and they asked more and
more questions. They also started making jokes....about me. One of
the low points of my week was that I burnt a pot of lentil beans on
Tuesday. (I don't know if any of you have burnt lentils before, but
burning lentils smell really really strongly of weed, and this is a
smell that makes me start to dry heave). So, for the rest of Tuesday,
my entire apartment smelled like marijuana. I shared this information
with my students, and they made jokes about how the rest of my week
went up from there, and was I sure that they were lentil beans? They
also suggested to the other students that they should have burned
lentil beans at the low points in their week.
Anyway. The activity also gave the
students a chance to vent about some of the more difficult parts of
their work (nothing is going right this week, too much overtime) and
to share some outside information with us (for example, I learned
that one of my students has a chicken farm, and that another one
fishes and sells his catch to a local shop). I found it to be a very
enlightening activity, and the students really enjoyed talking about
themselves and sharing with the others.
