Reflections: Food, food, glorious food.

           Yesterday I substituted for a teacher who was sick, so it was a nice change of pace. The class is an intermediate-high (speaking) Middle-school class. Like the other classes, the focus is mostly on oral communications. I tried to apply some of the MIC techniques more forcefully in order to reduce my power-distance problem in the class. We were learning about foods from around the world and I thought I might try Role Reversal and have one of the students come up to the front of the class and test his peers on which foods come from which countries. I gave him a hand-out with the answers and he called out questions for his classmates to shout back answers to. The other students did seem more engaged and excited when they saw one of their own up there role-playing as the teacher. He took his role seriously and carefully enunciated questions such as “where does the naan come from?” and seemed to delight in the hands that shot up. This went on for a few minutes and seemed moderately successful, but I didn’t really know where to take it. I obviously lack the time to have every student take on the teacher role. I considered having them quiz each other in groups, but in the past group-leader rule has often devolved into ‘Lord of the Flies’-esque chaos. Regardless, they responded well to this initial warm-up and I think it was the best part of the lesson for them.

           Later on in the class I modeled dialogue on the WB for them to practice (eg: “What is a food you like?”, “What is a food you love?”, “What is a food you can’t stand?”, “My favorite food is ________ while my least-favorite food is ______________ “, “My mom is good at cooking ________”, etc) and tried to encourage some student-to-student interactions. As I proctored, I noticed this yielded more mixed results. For some students, the dialogue was too complex to grasp, while others were just unmotivated and/or restless. If I have this class again in the future, I’ll remember to keep their interactions simpler. Although the class as a whole went pretty well, by the end they started to lose focus and goof off a bit.

           My limitations in the middle-class environment stubbornly persist, but perhaps each week I chip away at them a bit more as I challenge myself to affect a more positive dimension in the classes I teach. Every class is teachable, at least on a base level, and the struggle is to find what the students respond to and figure out how you can utilize that to teach your lesson in a way that engages them. Slowly, but surely, I think my instincts in this area are improving.