Fuddland
After having a pretty light schedule for the last six months or so, it’s been a fairly busy month or two as I picked up several part-time teaching gigs, mostly at summer schools for kids and teens. With the more strictly-enforced visa restrictions causing problems for a vast swathe of the foreigners who have been, up to now, able to enjoy relative freedom in where they worked, those of us who were lucky enough to have the right kind of visa are much in demand, and it has really been a case of me deciding how busy I wanted to be.
One summer school is just four boys between the ages of 8 and 11, three afternoons a week, which is easy and fun: a bit of reading, a bit of practising-short-talks-to-impress-grandparents, and a good smattering of games.
My approach is to try and make these things as laid-back as possible, to give the kids a chance to enjoy their summer holidays despite being forced to attend classes by their evil parents. My crowning achievement [teaching-wise] is to get them to look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. At the beginning of the course these kids would read aloud until they got to a new word and just stop dead, look up at me and expect me to provide them with the pronunciation and meaning. I was happy to do this for a while, but eventually they needed to realise that Teacher David isn’t always going to be around and it’s useful to be able to check definitions and pronunciations themselves. [Since they learn English as a foreign language at school, they’re all entirely familiar with the phonetic alphabet (unlike me).] It took me three lessons to get them all to remember to bring dictionaries, but now they look words up without prompting. This might not sound like much but it’s a skill that bewilderingly lacks in most students I come across, adults as well as children.
One of their favourite games is one in which I write new words up on the board, and call out the definitions of them. The students line up two at a time at the other end of the classroom and have to race to the board and be the first to touch the word that matches the definition. Being boys, they tear down the room at worrying rates, each trying to trip or otherwise impede the other before crashing into the wall, often randomly hitting the board until they land on the right word. It’s hugely entertaining for me as well as them. I think I might try it with an adult class next time things are getting a bit boring.
