A moment of calm

I've just uploaded RA Stage 4, and hopefully I've now got a few days to get things in order before the onslaught continues. And I certainly need it, as I'm currently tired and worn out in that way that only comes when you've been doing all the work you possibly can for various months, and still have so much more to do which you should have done some time ago, except you're just too tired and things keep mounting up and you don't seem to really be getting anywhere.

This last point is primarily because, after weeks of working on my assignments and trying to do the best I could, I found out that I'd failed the essay for LSA3. Which means that my module 2 experience has all been a downhill slope; I got a merit for LSA1, a pass for LSA2, and now a fail. Right before the big one, LSA4. It's all rather depressing and demotivating, and not least because I thought that my work for LSA3 was actually quite good in the end. It does kick the wind out of you to discover that not only can you not write a decent assignment, but for that matter, you can't even identify good from bad.

I did however have a good teaching experience before we had our pre-Easter exam week. I'd arranged for a colleague to come and observe me, in part to have that info for my RA Stage 4. I was working on phonology with joke telling as the focus of the class, and it all worked quite well; I was able to see some progress and have some clarity in this area which so often has been difficult for me to demonstrate clearly. By the end of the session, students were able to tell each other the joke with improved fluency. 

The other good, albeit slightly odd, thing in that class was that I did quite a good revision activity for modifying comparatives. This is something that students have struggled with throughout the semester, and I came up with the idea of taking in some of my pokémon cards for students to practice comparing the creatures in pairs and groups; ie. "cottonee is a little bit cuter than squirtle". It all worked very well, making me think that so often this type of learning works best when it can be transferred to something tangible, like the cards, or the cuissenaire rods that I used last semester. It seems to give the students a concrete grasp on the situation that otherwise escapes them. The odd thing though was that one student was taking photos of the cards at some point, and so I asked her what she was doing, and she told me that she was taking a photo as she was enjoying the class so much, as it was so dynamic". Students have demanded dynamic classes from me on many occasions, and I hadn't realised before that pokémon cards were the missing ingredient for this.