Teaching Post 9/25-9/27

Well... This week of teaching was fairly uneventful. On Tuesday we did peer evaluation on the students' rough drafts. They need to turn in their final copy of the compare/contrast essay by next Tuesday - I really think that these essays as a whole will be a lot better than the last ones. I was fairly impressed with the last set of essays, I mean from seeing the students' writing the first time we went through evaluations and then assessing them a couple of more times in class, I was kind of worried about some of them, but overall I was very happy. We also started reading some example essays and I had the students look at them for mistakes and content. It was a very good exercise and I believe the students learned a lot of stuff that they already knew through the experience.

Thursday was a great day! I broke the students up into groups of two and evaluate the example essays I gave them on Tuesdays. They again, were to pick out the construction features and mistakes in the essays. The students then had to present the essays to the class and high light its features. It was a great exercise and I think we all learned from it.

Upon reading the chapters in Brown for this week. I have learned a couple of things. First, I really don't need to give extrinsic motivation to the extent that I have been giving it. For some reason I always feel I need to give the students some kind of initial reward for their work. I do give a lot of verbal praise, and a lot of times I feel that it's not authentic - I think I need to tone it down a little and be real with my verbal rewards. On the other hand, I feel like I'm doing a lot of things right. I think that our classroom is very open and that students feel comfortable and motivated (intrinsicly). When I create classroom activities I try to make them authentic and I really try to make things student centered - sometimes I feel like I accomplish this and sometimes I feel like I don't. I know that all of the students will be suffering from some form of culture shock within the next couple of months and I want them to know that their ESL teacher knows how they feel and that they have a comfortable place to go in their ESL classroom :-)