12/10/12 classes

12/10/12
7am class:
Generally I felt happy with this class. My aims (primarily to focus on and clarify the planning stage of argumentative essay writing) were appropriate, the students seemed to find them useful, and I was able to achieve what I had planned to. (nb. The only exception here was that my students weren't able to evaluate one of the model essays that I'd planned to, as I hadn't copied it. In retrospect though, this was perhaps serendipitous, as it wasn't strictly necessary, and by not doing this activity, there was more time to work on other tasks. This is one thing that I've seen quite a lot lately, particularly, but not exclusively, with this class - I do at times have to skip / leave out some planned activities, as they take more time / become more engrossed in a particular activity than I have envisioned). Ss responded well to questions about essay form and evaluation criteria, and I think that some ambiguities were cleared up. This was useful for the next part of the class, when Ss looked at their marked essays and tried to understand why I had given particular grades. Ss will now write a new opinion essay for Wednesday, so fingers crossed they will show improvement in terms of structure!

1pm & 3pm classes:
These generally floundered, due to a) student protests taking over Bogotá this afternoon, b) said protests causing widespread disruption to transport services, c) an important match for the Colombian football team being played mid-afternoon, and d) the perennial favourite - torrential rain! Turnout wasn't great, and it was hard to get students to focus on their work when there are explosions and such happening within earshot, and echoing up the street to the university. Some language work was possible at least, in terms of some presentation practice (although not taken seriously, and perhaps not of great use for the actual evaluated presentations which will be starting in a few weeks) and work on opinion essays (although really not as much as I wanted to work on - again, we'll see what they produce for Wednesday's class. I suspect that many may not do the essay, or indeed skip the class because they didn't do the essay. The quiz on the 22nd will still require them to write an essay, though) in the 1pm class. In the 3pm class, there was some vocab work, and some work on narrative skills through storytelling. In both classes there was a chance to work a bit on my dogme abilities ahead of my EP class on Wednesday - I did some focus on emergent language in the 1pm class, and some impromptu chat with the 3pm students. Glad to have that chance, but overall, it could have gone a bit better.