The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Today’s reading was about a woman who was driving with a cat on top of her car. Another guy on the road spotted the cat and tried to tip her off. She freaked out when she noticed he was following her. She turned left, and she turned right, but she couldn’t shake the creep, so she drove to the police station. An officer told her about the cat and suddenly the man seemed less of a villain.

It’s interesting to think about the cultural appropriateness of this story. Most of the students are learning English so that they can attend an American university, but Yousef* is a little bit older and already has a career as a math teacher. He is here chaperoning a cohort of Saudi women. By “chaperoning”, I mean he accompanies them EVERYWHERE they go. He actually didn’t come to class today, but I kept wondering what he would think of this woman, driving alone (well, besides the cat), being followed by a strange man.

I think I mentioned that I would be teaching for the first half of class today. Well, I did and it went pretty well. Here are some highlights:

• The Good: I managed the heck out of the time. This is something I tend to struggle with, so it is a success I’m particularly proud of. 

• The Bad (well, not bad exactly, just not fantastic): I designed a cloze activity for the students to do with a partner. I found a stylized local map online that included key buildings and landmarks, and indicated a starting location. Then for half the class, I whited out a few place names. I whited out a few different place names for the other half of the class. Students with mismatched maps were to pair up and practice giving each other directions. Once they knew where a certain place was, they were to fill in the missing place names on their maps. 

• I was hoping it would be communicative. It was. They talked. They exchanged information. This was good.

• I was hoping it would be challenging. It was. They had to use English for an extended period of time. They had to listen and pronounce things carefully (one pair got hung up on a misunderstanding of “straight” as “street”). They had to use new vocabulary and grammatical structures. The trouble was, understanding what they were supposed to be doing was also a HUGE challenge. And it took a looooooooong time. Even after several different attempts on my part, some of them were completely in the dark until their more astute classmates clued them in in Arabic. 

• I was hoping it would be relevant. I used a local map. I thought they might learn something about their new city. Mustafa* took one look at the map and exclaimed, “What is this?!?!” “It’s a map,” I said. “But everyone have GPS,” he countered. “I don’t.” “Everyone have iPhone!” “I don’t. I use a map.” He gave me a look of utter incredulity and said, “I buy you iPhone tomorrow.” 

• The Ugly: I didn’t call on all the students equally. Samir* was particularly left out. He doesn’t often volunteer answers in class, and I didn’t  solicit his participation much… because I forgot his name.

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

"He is beautiful."

Today was my first day in class, but it actually started on Tuesday, so they had already met once without me. It’s an introductory (the lowest level offered at the school) reading class. There are 10 students, and all are male. One is Kuwaiti, one is from the UAE, and the rest are from Saudi Arabia. They range in age from about 17 to 60.

Update: There are only eight students in the class now. Yousef* stopped attending for unknown (to me) reasons and Faisal* transferred to a Basic I class (the next level up).

Agatha* is my mentor. She is from Hungry, but you’d never guess that English isn’t her first language. She has many years of experience teaching in several different contexts. When we met yesterday, she promised me that she would be entertaining in the classroom, and she didn’t disappoint. She moves around a LOT and both her voice and her body language are extremely expressive. It would be pretty difficult to ignore her. I think I tend to be pretty stationary when I teach – mostly because I cling to my notes like a security blanket – so I hope watching Agatha will help me loosen up a bit.

She started out the class with a vocabulary review activity (the words were introduced on Tuesday). She gave each student a couple of cards, each with one word on it, and asked them to describe it, act it out, or give a synonym. As I type, I realize how boring this sounds, but it wasn’t. Like I said, Agatha is entertaining.

After a couple more short activities, we jumped into Unit 1 in the textbook. We’re using “Easy True Stories: A Picture-based Beginning Reader” by Sandra Heyer. I can’t speak to the content yet, but the cover is truly hideous. It’s mostly brown with some clashing blues and a bit of purple thrown in for good measure. It’s also distractingly busy and has a font reminiscent of the old west. They say you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, which is good, because this one isn't going to incite a love of reading in anyone any time soon. Thank goodness I’m just borrowing a copy, because I definitely don't want it to sully my bookcase permanently.

The Unit 1 pre-reading activity is a series of line-drawn scenes from “The Color TV”, a gripping tale of crime and deception. The book instructs, “Look at the pictures. Listen to your teacher tell the story,” but Agatha had the students describe what they saw in the different scenes. She incorporated some more vocabulary review and a little grammar lesson into this activity, focusing the students’ attention on present and present continuous tenses. 

In the “easy true story”, Jim sees a robbery take place. Since giving a detailed physical description is often a key part of eyewitness testimony, Agatha had the students practice this vital life skill. She gave them each a magazine clipping and asked them to take turns describing the person pictured. As a warm-up she asked the class as a whole to describe me while she wrote key vocabulary and sentence structures on the board. Omar* went first. “He is beautiful,” he said... I’ll sleep easy tonight knowing that the police aren’t likely to find me with that description!

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.