English Camp!

I won't post about my BTS experience -- not for today, nor in general -- because I am too exhausted and upset to be neutral. I imagine lots of people have experienced difficult classrooms ... none of the other teachers like these classes, either, but we do it because we don't want to refuse work and because we need the money. It's demoralizing.

So, I'd rather write about something positive today and stop beating myself up. Last week I taught at an English camp for teenagers...we have classes 5 hours a day, 5 days a week. This time we had 4 groups of students: 6/5eme (early middle school), 4eme (late middle), 3eme (Freshman), and a high school group. I split my time between the 6/5eme and 3eme and had a completely awesome time with the kids. Normally I am not made for teenagers, but in a one-week situation like this I always end up having fun and they do as well.

With the younger group, I experimented with TPR storytelling, and it really worked well! I'm going to write a specific post on that later on, but my initial reaction is that I'm going to pursue that further and figure out how to adapt it to once-a-week classes. On Monday as I was leading them through the first steps, most of them looked at me as if to say, "Lady, there is no way I'm going to make these silly gestures in front of my peers." By Friday they were all standing up and having fun with it...two of them started to cooperate together in order to act out the more complex gestures. I'm not sure if this will be my main method, but I'd like to incorporate it on a regular basis.

I also ended up spending less time on smaller, different activities and spent long chunks of time working towards a specific goal. If there is one thing I could change about my teaching, it would be to figure out how to adapt the little time I have once a week with the kids in order to do more things like this. One child also responded really well to the whole idea of goal-setting. On the first day after we wrote stories, acted out situations and played games, I asked the class, "So, did we do any grammar points today?" They all simultaneously said, "Nooooooooooo!" and shook their heads. "Ha!" I said. "Oh, yes, we did! Think about it." Tick, tock, tick, tock. One kid figured it out quickly and that's all it took.

On Friday, I noticed one kid in particular had stopped saying, "I don't understand what I have to do." He said, "I don't understand the goal," and he was not being critical or sarcastic. Once he got what the point of the activity was, he said, "Oh, okay!" and he literally sat on the edge of his chair and participated full-out. I just really tried to present English to them as something useful, something they can use and do fun things with. Another thing I pushed was reading for fun and during their "DEAR" time, they actually did read. (DEAR=Drop Everything and Read; I stole it from basic elementary school stuff).

For the older group, I did throw in a bit more hard-core grammar stuff, but only because they requested it. They were serious students and I tried to give them a few more complex points and then practice it in speaking. The first day we covered the Present Perfect and P.P. Continuous, primarily focusing on the P.P.C. The next day we did modals of obligation and also the difference between ed/ing adjectives. During both of my grammar presentation sections the kids looked absolutely bored to tears, but they were hanging in there. I think I spent about one half hour on the grammar and the other 4 1/2 hours were activity based, heavily focused on speaking.

The funny thing was that when I asked them to give feedback on the day, they tended to love the games and speaking activities (of course) but they all said the grammar was also extremely useful for them. Not one said that the games were useful, even if they did enjoy them. I wonder how they would have answered if I had pushed the "activity 1st/grammar 2nd" point of view like I did with the other class. It makes me want to make sure I validate games with all the others so they'll see them as constructive, not just fun.