Category Archives: Day by Day in the Classroom

Another Post for the Competition!

I’ve posted a two part post (I  have a 250 word limit there!) about homework.

I have written about this topic often here so you will find the content familiar. The posts themselves are not copies of posts from this blog.

I’m NOT Joking – Homework can make students feel more NOTICED! Part One

I’m not Joking – Homework makes students feel more NOTICED! Part 2

Feel free not to click if you’ve been listening to me as things developed!

 

Showcasing Students’ Word Clouds – Advice Please!

I’ve asked the students who are studying the story Mr. Know-All (by Somerset Maugham) to a make a word cloud of the sentences describing Max Kelada’s appearance.

Here are two examples of students’ clouds:

Mor's Word Cloud    Heli 2

I’m still looking for the best and easiest way to showcase the word clouds.

At first I made a page for them on our class site. There are four clouds there. The one that looks small and odd is the one I added the easy way – embedding the code. I tried resizing it but it doesn’t “behave”. The other three I copied with Jing, pasted into paintbrush, saved as a picture (in Jpeg) and then uploaded them to the page. That’s actually less work than it sounds as it goes fairly quickly. On the other hand I still have many word clouds to upload!

Without solving THAT problem I decided to move the clouds to simple booklet. They take too much space on the wiki page and I want them to be large. On this site each student will get a page.

However, I have the same problem. If I embed code, on this site it won’t resize at all! If I repeat the process described above it looks very nice.

Any suggestions?

I’ve Entered a Competition!

That’s a very odd thing for me to say.

I’m REALLY not a competitive person.

The competition is a blogathon. And blogging is all about collaboration, not competition! I can get really excited about what other people have posted without feeling less proud of my own post!

Despite all of that, first prize at this blogathon is HUGE – an all expenses paid trip to IATEFL in Glasgow!

So I DID enter the competition!

The number of participants in this blogathon is also HUGE, so I have decided to focus on making a splash.

Since I cannot keep up with “double blogging” (don’t forget my Hebrew blog too!) for the next few weeks I will be letting you all know what I have posted on the competition’s blog. You can comment there – the judges also look at comments!

So here’s the first post. A familiar topic but most certainly not one you have read before!

Yes, teacher! Google and I did my homework!

Whoa! Stop Asking Questions!

intimidating

Photo by Gil Epshtein

Picture the following: a group of high-school students engaged, curious and asking questions. What more could a teacher hope for?

Who in her right mind would tell the students to stop asking questions?

Er, um, I just did.

I’m teaching the short story “Mr. Know-All” by Somerset Maugham, as part of the requirements of the literature program. This is a story that requires quite a bit of background knowledge, in addition to having difficult vocabulary.

I knew that.

Before the students and I began the story itself they had to check when World War 1 ended and where was Yokohama. They had an online homework assignment to find pictures related to ships for vocabulary items in the story, such as “port-holes,” “trunk” and “cabin” (wanted to ensure they didn’t think it was a cabin in the woods!). I talked to them inL1 about British Colonialism and made sure they knew that India was once under British Rule (critical for understanding the story!) We talked briefly about prohibition too.

I planned to explain little things such as “some countries have names for their flags” (Union Jack is mentioned in the story) or why gentlemen used to need several brushes (not just for their hair!) as we encountered them. I was also prepared with an explanation about superstitions regarding the night air.

I thought that armed with that information we were ready to start the story itself and face the difficult vocabulary.

It is slow going, as I expected but I didn’t anticipate the immense volume of questions!

Here’s one example:

“King George has many strange subjects”. That’s a line from the first part of the story.

I stopped to explain what “subjects” means as hardly any of the students knew what the word meant in L1 either.

Then a boy asked if the King of England decides things such as laws in England. So I tried comparing the roles of the monarch to that of our president. Another student pointed out that our president had once been a prime minister, so he wanted to know if the prime minister can later become a King. Someone else asked if the royal person that got married recently will be the next king. And why isn’t the Queen’s husband called a King too? Then someone complained that he was confused regarding the different uses of “English” & “British” (not to mention Great Britain and United Kingdom) and are those places I mentioned before (Wales, North Ireland & Scotland) colonies too?

Whoa!

I LOVE to see my students taking an interest in general world knowledge but we have a complex story line to follow here! How does the proverb go – too many trees and you lose sight of the forest?

Part of my job is to keep the students focused and I  find myself stopping them and leaving some questions unanswered. At our slow pace we have to focus on the information needed to understand the story!

Still, I never thought I would be doing such a thing more than once in a blue moon!

Mixing a Thornbury Post, Google Translator and My Students

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(photo of a bench in Tel-Aviv, taken by me!)

In his  post “P is for Problematizing” Scott Thornbury introduces a very interesting activity.

He suggests a delightful way to highlight the importance of the indefinite article “a”.

Of course, me being me, I didn’t try the lesson in the manner he described.

I ran the sentences in the original activity through Google Translator and made the following astonishing discovery:

Google translator can’t tell the difference between sentences such as

A girl with a long hair.

A girl with long hair

Google translator translated both this pair of sentences and all the others in the original post in an identical manner into Hebrew.

Since I’m very interested in redesigning my homework tasks to take into account the fact that the students use Google Translate intensively at home (more about that here) I decided to use the sentences as a homework task.

I give short homework, once a week, often designed to highlight a very specific topic or aspect. So, highlighting the importance of the article “a” seemed just the thing to do.

I called the task: You are SMARTER than GOOGLE Tranlsate.

I gave instructions in their mother tongue, reminding the students of what he had learned in class about the article “a”. I also explained that the sentences should be translated differently but Google doesn’t. I asked them to take note of the extra options Google Translate offers and translate the sentences correctly into Hebrew.

I gave them the following sentences, chosen from the original post but purposely grouped together to make it easier:

1) This is a room with a glass on the floor.

This is a room with glass on the floor

2) This man is buying paper

This man is buying a paper

3) A room with a light in it.

This is the room with light in it.

4) A girl with a long hair.

She is a girl with long hair.

For some of the weaker students I supplied the sentences translated into Hebrew, but jumbled up.

Well, I’ve checked most of the homework tasks. Turns out I gave a lot of thought to one aspect but ran into trouble with other aspects.

The students who got the translations in the incorrect order did well. They had the article “a” isolated and the difference between the sentences with it and without it was the main thing they had to pay attention to.

The stronger students ran into trouble, in varying degrees.

In the original post the students are asked to draw the sentences. That didn’t seem suitable for homework tasks which I receive by email. But translating is a different skill and I should have known better.

Some students translated “a glass” as meaning “ a single piece” of glass, not a glass you drink from. Only one student translated “ a paper” as a newspaper.

And, surprisingly enough, it was the fourth pair of sentences which students had trouble with (I thought it was the easiest pair!).

What I should have done is give the stronger pupils the translations into Hebrew too, but without the full explanations in Hebrew. Their task should have been to match the translations and then explain what the difference is between all of the pairs of the sentences. That would have been a better way to achieve my original goal.

Next year…

Parent / Teacher Night as an Opportunity for Professional Development

I’ve been attending Parent / Teacher Nights for a great many years both as a teacher and as a parent and have never seen it as an opportunity for professional development.

That is, until now.

Perhaps my time in “blogosphere” has opened my eyes.

I had the opportunity to witness an amazing example of how a teacher communicated with a 10th grader and her mother.  The student was full of complaints. She didn’t think it was a big deal that she used her cell-phone in class once or twice  and sometimes talked during the lessons. Also she claimed that she knew English at a much higher level than the grades she got indicated. You could tell that the mother was indecisive regarding whether she should be berating her daughter or justifying her behavior.

 

P1051203Photo by Iddo Epstein

I expected such a beginning to lead to either one of two outcomes, both exemplified by the photo above:

1)  The teacher (penguin) scolds the parent for turning a  blind eye to her offspring’s behavior while she, the teacher, is the one who is really trying to look after the student’s best interests.

2) The parent (penguin) scolds the teacher for being mean and vindictive towards her offspring. The teacher just wishes she could disappear and be somewhere else…

This meeting did not go in any of these directions. It lasted for twenty minutes (!!!) and it is difficult to describe in words exactly what went on. I wish I had been able to videotape that conversation! It would have been great to see it again and to discuss it with others.

What I can say is that the teacher kept her voice relaxed and pleasant the whole time. No scolding tone. She stressed how delighted she was to hear that the student knew more English than her grades reflected but the only way the teacher can know such a thing is if this knowledge is shown. If the student doesn’t participate and talks to her friends during the lesson then she is forcing the teacher to rely only on her grades. The teacher also repeatedly explained how important it is to maintain a good “learning atmosphere”  in the class and that she cannot allow disruptive behaviors that interfere with everyone’s ability to focus. The teacher repeated how delighted she would be to take note of any new manifestation of her knowledge of English but not once did she back down from anything that she had said to the student during class or any behavioral comments that had been reported.

The meeting ended with the student promising to participate more in class so the teacher could see her skills in English in action.

All the indicators of tension-leading-to-attack mode were diffused.

Both sides left the table optimistic and satisfied.

WOW!

* NOTE: This photo was taken in Antarctica by Iddo. That’s a Southern Elephant Seal and a female, which is why you don’t really see much of a trunk.

Iddo said that the penguins there scold the Elephant Seals a lot. In one instance, in response to such a scolding, a seal rolled over and hit the seal beside it with its flipper. The second seal did not hit the first one back, but rolled over and hit a third one instead! This was passed down through three more seals until there was no one left within “hitting” range!

Scolding doesn’t seem to do anyone any good!

Are We Just Inflating (or deflating) Students’ Grades by Including Behavior?

DSCF2805     DSCF2825

It is THAT time of year again and I feel as conflicted as ever.

The high-school where I work has a policy that student-like behavior is worth 20% of the semester’s grade.

The policy is that the goal of the school is education in the broad sense and a student should be rewarded (or penalized, as the case may be) for behaviors related to coming to class on time, bringing the required materials, participating in the lesson and general attitude toward studying (trying hard means a lot, even if the student is weak).

However, the grades are looked as an indicator of how well the students are doing and which level of leaving exams (matriculation) they should be taking.

I can’t honestly say these grades realistically reflect the students’ level of English with the 20% factored in.

What is the policy in your school?

Progress Doesn’t Always Come In Through the Front Door

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Photo by Roni Epstein

Remember the 10th grade girl that CAME TO ME three weeks ago to discuss the fact that she hasn’t been doing any homework? Well if you expect to hear that everything has been “hunky dory” since that conversation then you are reading the wrong blog…

The progress report, up to a few days ago, was that we had begun exchanging emails. No actual homework task had been done, but now we were “connected”.

Then, during our last lesson, I discovered that for some reason this girl, whom I will call T, hadn’t worked at our Y.A.L.P word station yet. I asked another girl, whom we will call G to be here tutor there. G and T are friends and have a lot in common – they are both loud and noisy, both weak students who tend to balk easily at a task.

But G has worked 7 times at the Y.A.L.P word station already.

Out of the fifty irregular verbs in the past she is working on, she now knows thirty two. She began with three.

T didn’t want to go to the word station. She kind of waved her hand in the air and said that I must be crazy if I think she’s going to work with a pile of words. I didn’t say anything. G dragged her over and kept saying:” You got to see how much fun this is, I laugh all the time. And look at my progress chart – see I didn’t know the words either!”.  T knew that the alternative was doing something with me so she opted for her friend.

The girls really worked the whole lesson (which, by the way, gave me much needed quiet to work with others!) and seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Today my colleague sent me a message that T had left me a homework assignment on my desk!!!! Assignment number one!

Note: One of the joys of having my own blog! So much happens in the classroom every day, about some of which I’m pleased and some of which I’m not. It is good to sit down and write about progress – reminds me that I need patience for those other issues!