Intensive Week is designed to allow our Sprint students a chance to make up any lessons they've missed in the past four months. Rather than giving regular lessons, we're supposed to use lesson plans from our supplemental materials. This is less to educate students and more to sell them stuff. The Tatsujin series (focused on Listening and Vocabulary) don't come cheap, but this is a perfect opportunity to show them off and dazzle the students with them. Too bad I have a pretty weak sell - though one student did ask me lots of questions about them and wondered if I thought they would help her. Considering she was asking about the Listening series, I emphatically replied yes, because . . . yeah, that's a weak spot for her.
Anyway, I have decided that I don't like Intensive Week and that I will prepare my own lesson plans for it from now on. The lessons from Head Office aren't terrible, they're just . . . ridiculous. The supplemental materials are not meant to be stretched out to 45 minutes (the Tatsujin series even states on the box "15 minutes per day"), and the amount of info given could cover about 2 hours of teaching, especially if the students are a little lower level. The warm-up exercises themselves could take up half an hour if the students aren't sure what's going on. See, the thing about Intensive Week is that Benni-sensei's students can take my classes and vice versa. So, I had a couple of mixed classes in which I had some fairly low-level students trying to keep up with more advanced speakers.
Actually, that was a little amusing. Naofumi in a class with five of Benni-sensei's Sprint 4/5 ladies? Funny. He's a little on the shy side, and he was a little overwhelmed at first, but he ended up being quite helpful. And Benni-sensei says that the ladies enjoyed themselves, so it wasn't a complete disaster. In fact, two of those students will be moving up to a Spring 6 class with me in the spring, so I was glad to have a little intro to them. They were just impressed that I knew their names.
But, really, the lesson plans were kind of useless to me. Plus, it didn't help that one of the suggested books is not in our library (Benni-sensei thinks that one of the former managers "borrowed it"), so I had to rush to make one up. And then I didn't even need it because the student - one of Benni-sensei's - just wanted to talk the entire time. Motosu-san is a very nice elderly gentleman who is a retired farmer. I spent most of the 45 minutes listening to him talk about his recent stay in the hospital, and trust me, you probably don't want to know why he was there. Let's just say it was educational for both of us, and you never know when catheters will suddenly come up in conversation.
I will be very glad to go back to the Sprint schedule next week. I just consider myself lucky that I only had four Intensive lessons - Benni-sensei had eight, and I'm sure there are teachers out there who have more than that. It's somewhat ironic that most of the training in Vancouver was geared towards teaching Sprint classes when I have a relatively small number of them. The majority of my classes are Active.
Still, another GEOS experience under the belt. Things can get back to normal for a little while. Best of all, winter vacation is only a week away!
2 comments:
one of my students is a day time sprint, and all we do is LNT every week.... We spend maybe 15 minutes doing free talk where I check her grammar and add new vocabulary, and then we dive into the LNT. We listen, do the activities, and then read through it twice. It's pretty mundane, but the time goes quickly.
I am also glad this week is over. Hellooooo no more kids classes.
really? hmm, yeah, I could see how it would work. my problem was that I had barely even *looked* at the Tatsujin series and wasn't familiar enough with it to make it go properly. I like the series, and now that I've worked a little with it, I feel better about suggesting it to my students. I think my main problem is with Head Office's lesson plans. Of the four classes I did, only one kept to the plan - the rest couldn't manage it. Next time, I'll just prepare better.
Word on the no codomo classes for a week. I'm happier about that than anything else.
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