Know what's in my ss heads

The most dangerous word a teacher can use is "they", as in "they enjoyed the class" or "they understood the material".
There shoudl be no such thing as a geberal "they".  Innstead the focus should be on each and every individual learner: "What did Maria learn?  What did Pedro have trouble with?".

Of course every teacher thinks that they've answered that question only to find nasty surprises when deadlines and tests come around and they find that not all of "them" do well.

I'm no exception.

This term I vow to try harder to do better: to be more aware of what's going on in every student's head at every minute of every lesson.

Impossible, you say?  Teachers do at least six impossible things every day!  

Enforcement-free English only

I can either be teacher or "cop", not both.  Alfie Kohn points out that one major flaw with a system of rewards and punishments is that if it's to be enforced, you have to be vigilant.  That cuts into my teaching time.  If I have one student with a legitimate question and one student speaking his mother tongue instead of English, I don't want to be diving my attention.

Fortunately, an idea a friend gave me a long time ago got buried in my subconcious and finally resurfaced the other day. 
I have a little doll that's supoosed to look like Slash, the rock guitarist (a long-time crush of mine).  If I hear someone speaking Spanish, I simply put Slash on that student's desk.  Then I step back.  If that student hears someone else speak Spanish, he gives the doll to her.  Whoever has Slash at the end of the period loses a point off their final grade. 
Now I don't have to be cop.

Of, course, they're now policing each other, and as we all saw in the Harry Potter stories, that's not exactly a sweet thing either... 

What capoeira taught me

As a Jewish child, every Passover I was taught that we had been slave in Egypt for four hundred years.  Despite the rich traditions surrounding the storytelling, the concept of slavery meant little to me. 

As a teenager, I read Harriet Jacob's "Incidents in the life of a slave girl" and I was moved to tears.

As a twenty-something in Latin America, I decided to learn capoeira, an athletic, dance-inspired Brazilian martial-art done to music.  I learned that, unlike the more severe martial arts of the Far East, capoeira was not an upper-class military activity.  It was preparation for a slave revolt.  It was disguised as dance to make the overlords think "Oh, how sweet, the slaves are dancing".  In reality it was practice for a fight to death or freedom.  To disguise it even further, it is traditionally performed inside a human circle.

Then I learned capoeira angola.  Instead of energetic high kicks and acrobatics, this version was slower and closer to the ground.
The performers of capoeira angola had worn leg irons.

Suddenly the brutal dehumanization of slavery hit me in the gut.  I understood slavery from the inside.  That feeling of raw empathy has stayed with me.

That is the power of games.  When you hear about an injustice, you understand it intellectually and move on.  When you read a first-hand account, you feel sympathy.  But when you experience the injustice through the mechanics of a well-designed game, you come to understand the true horror of having your freedom curtailed, if only for a fraction of a second.  But it stays with you.

I'd incorporate MMOs

Today's blog prompt from www.teachthought.com asks us to write about a piece of technology we'd like to incorporate in our school this year.
Gamers need to use English to communicate, particularly those playing MMOs (massively mulitplayer online games).  As an EFL teacher, I would love to encourage my students to play these more so they can see how English really is necessary: not just in some distant far off future in some distant far off land in the real world, but in some distant future in a distant land right now on your computer!

Goals for this year

Katie Salen of the Institute of Play talks about the principles of game-like learning, the 7th of which is "it kind of feels like play".   My teaching goal for is year is to make everything feel like play.  It already does for me...but how to make it so for my students.  Ay, there's the rub!

Me vs Me: a challenge

I really enjoy lesson planning.

There, I said it.

I enjoy lesson planning the way some people enjoy cooking or writing novels or making music.  It relaxes me.  It energises me.  My lessons are the very essence of ME.

So, to feed that, I'm going to set myself a little challenge.  This semester, I promised my students more demo lessons for them to analyse.  But this time, I'm going to ask them to give me a topic, language point or subskill, a level or age and a method or a trend.  Then I'll prepare a short demo lesson for the following week.

You know what's even more fun?  I can even make bad lessons and just call it an analytical learning experience for them!

Human rights games re-thought

In order to inspire my students to take an interest in the human-rights games project, my idea is to turn it into a game itself.  I will show the students all of the games I have.  They may then use one of my games as is, adapt it or design something else entirely.  They will then have to insure that it is  throughly play-tested and make sure the materials are aesthetic and well-designed.  On the day/days where we play our games with visitors, the visitors will be asked to rate the games they play in terms of effectiveness as a learning tool as well as in terms of fun.  Whoever gets the highest rating gets the full 10 points, the second place winner gets 9, third, 8,  and the rest get 7 (the passing grade).