03/16/06 I have students -- Yea!!! One of the newbies from Tues returned plus Manuel and 2 more newbies came tonight. (I convinced Guadalupe to move "up" to Betty's class and he reluctantly agreed.) So now , except for Manuel, I have an all "new" class of very beginners. Thursdays are the nights I work with Rebecca, and we both decided not to begin registering and testing the newbies the minute they hit the door. So I got to work with them the first segment of the evening and hopefully make them feel welcome and less anxious.
OK -- I'm going to go on one more rant about SCC and then I'm done. Having brand new students fill out a bunch of forms (which they don't understand) and take a test (which makes them feel stupid right off the bat) does NOT seem to me to be the best way to organize a site. Having the same person do registration, testing, AND teaching of very beginners creates chaos and a very unwelcoming situation. Why don't they have the teacher of the highest level class do the registration and testing? At least her students can more easily be given group or solo work to do while she's doing something else. At least they can understand DIRECTIONS she'd give them to work on their own. Doesn't SCC have goals of recruiting AND retaining students? Aren't they playing the numbers game too?? At NCCAT we treat teachers with what we've come to call Deep Hospitality. Well, I know I'm just a practicum student and I won't say any of this to anyone at SCC, but I can sure think of a better way to organize this program. This is a Zen lesson for me. I can only do the very best I can during each lesson. OMMMMMMMMMMMMM
And one more thing about SCC program -- the site coordinator Nancy came to me tonight and said -- "I understand (that means Genia probably told her) that you're not using the text in your lessons." She said she didn't care and I wasn't "in trouble" :) but she must've had some reason to even bring it up. I think she was worried that I wouldn't be teaching what students needed in order to be advanced in time into Betty's class. So -- I told her about my curriculum design class and how I was designing a hypothetical course using my students as targets and explained that I was focusing on skills measured on CASAS and supplementing the lessons with the text (which is actually a lie!) plus other outside material, blah, blah, blah. She seemed cool with that. So, folks, there IS some value in having goals and objectives clearly thought out!!
OK -- for tonight in anticipation of a group of new newbies, I planned a lesson around simple greeting conversation, learning names of letters, simple conversation to ask for someone's name, using alphabet to spell names. They were such beginners that the major accomplishment of the night was to learn how to spell their own name outloud using English alphabet. But hey -- what's more basic than that??? My final activity was to use phone book as authentic material to spell a name while a partner wrote it down -- listening for the letter and writing down the correct one., then reading the name to check and see if what they'd written was correct. I had actually planned for all that to be the first segment of the evening and had planned a lesson to introduce numbers 1-10 in second segment after the break. But we never even got to the numbers.
So, Chandrika, I'm sorry you weren't feeling well -- you sounded bad on the phone -- but I actually think I did some good tonight.
OK -- I'm going to go on one more rant about SCC and then I'm done. Having brand new students fill out a bunch of forms (which they don't understand) and take a test (which makes them feel stupid right off the bat) does NOT seem to me to be the best way to organize a site. Having the same person do registration, testing, AND teaching of very beginners creates chaos and a very unwelcoming situation. Why don't they have the teacher of the highest level class do the registration and testing? At least her students can more easily be given group or solo work to do while she's doing something else. At least they can understand DIRECTIONS she'd give them to work on their own. Doesn't SCC have goals of recruiting AND retaining students? Aren't they playing the numbers game too?? At NCCAT we treat teachers with what we've come to call Deep Hospitality. Well, I know I'm just a practicum student and I won't say any of this to anyone at SCC, but I can sure think of a better way to organize this program. This is a Zen lesson for me. I can only do the very best I can during each lesson. OMMMMMMMMMMMMM
And one more thing about SCC program -- the site coordinator Nancy came to me tonight and said -- "I understand (that means Genia probably told her) that you're not using the text in your lessons." She said she didn't care and I wasn't "in trouble" :) but she must've had some reason to even bring it up. I think she was worried that I wouldn't be teaching what students needed in order to be advanced in time into Betty's class. So -- I told her about my curriculum design class and how I was designing a hypothetical course using my students as targets and explained that I was focusing on skills measured on CASAS and supplementing the lessons with the text (which is actually a lie!) plus other outside material, blah, blah, blah. She seemed cool with that. So, folks, there IS some value in having goals and objectives clearly thought out!!
OK -- for tonight in anticipation of a group of new newbies, I planned a lesson around simple greeting conversation, learning names of letters, simple conversation to ask for someone's name, using alphabet to spell names. They were such beginners that the major accomplishment of the night was to learn how to spell their own name outloud using English alphabet. But hey -- what's more basic than that??? My final activity was to use phone book as authentic material to spell a name while a partner wrote it down -- listening for the letter and writing down the correct one., then reading the name to check and see if what they'd written was correct. I had actually planned for all that to be the first segment of the evening and had planned a lesson to introduce numbers 1-10 in second segment after the break. But we never even got to the numbers.
So, Chandrika, I'm sorry you weren't feeling well -- you sounded bad on the phone -- but I actually think I did some good tonight.
posted by Connie | 6:27 AM
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