My baptism by fire in teaching continues, with this week's feature being planning, writing, editing, giving, and grading a test. Once again, I was told of this with a few weeks to think about it, but nobody told me anything further. I'm getting used to this, so it was fine--I simply tracked down each of my teachers and asked them for their suggestions. From what I've gathered, the English final is portioned into three parts: 10% comes from the speaking test, 20% from the listening test, and the remaining 70% from a written test. I'm involved in the listening test portion of the first-year students' final exams, and I'm wholly responsible for their speaking test. It's only 10%, sure, but I was given more or less free reign over it. The teachers took a look at it first, of course, to make sure I wasn't doing anything crazy. I look at them as the quality control department--I'm fairly certain that, once I get the hang of things, they'll interfere less and less.
The speaking test consists of a one-on-one interview. We've got 20 students in each class, with a total of 8 different classes of first-year students. The speaking test was slotted for one 50-minute class period. That gives an absolute maximum of 2.5 minutes to each student, and that's assuming they teleport from their seat to my little interview table in the hallway. As it turns out, my school does not in fact own a working teleporter, so the students had to walk to and from the interview table.
My supervisor, who is one of the English teachers, told me the test should be from memory. Having no idea how much time it would take an average student to finish an interview test, how much an average student can memorize, or how difficult to make the material, I came up with a dialogue from one of our lessons (in this case, talking on the telephone). The dialogue consisted of about six lines, and was the second in a pair dealing with taking a message and returning a call. The first of the pair had A calling B asking for C, but C isn't around, so B takes a message. The second has C calling B back, explaining why they missed their call ("I was busy ~ing"), B asking C to do something, and B turning them down with a reason ("I have ~ practice"). Preferring to underdo it instead of overdoing it, I only wanted to use one of the dialogues, and have each student only read one part of the dialogue with me. My supervisor felt this was too easy, and suggested including both dialogues, and having each student read both parts. She's the veteran, and I'm the newbie; I went along with it.
One of the other teachers agreed that it's good to push the students, but the other two teachers were worried it'd be unmanageable. Before anything could be changed, though, I had to give the test to the first batch of students, so I went with the existing configuration. Once it's been given once, the exact same version has to be used for the remaining seven groups. (An interesting footnote: the two teachers who were for the harder version teach primarily higher-level students, with the other two teachers spending more time with the lower-end ones.)
Just for the sake of clarity, this is the dialogue:
A: Hello?
B: Hi! This is __. May I speak to __?
A: I'm sorry, but __ isn't here right now. May I take a message?
B: Would you please tell (him/her) to call me back? My phone number is __.
A: I'll give (him/her) the message.
A: Thank you! Bye.
B: Bye.
B: Hello?
C: Hi, __! This is __.
B: Hey, __!
C: I got your message. Sorry I missed your call. I was busy __ing.
B: That's okay. Would you like to go __ing tomorrow after school?
C: I'm sorry, but I can't. I have __ practice.
B: Okay. Bye!
C: Bye!
The students were free to use any names they wanted, though they had to use the correct pronoun. They could also use any phone number they wanted, and could say any kind of practice. For the "busy __ing" and "go __ing tomorrow" parts, I made cards with three pictures: shopping, fishing, and swimming. Each student would draw one of the cards, and use that word.
To recap the test setup, each student would read each part of each dialogue with me. That comes out to four dialogues per student. You've probably noticed the glaring problem this version presented: four dialogues in less than two and a half minutes comes out to no more than 30 seconds per dialogue. Try timing yourself having a six-line telephone dialogue that includes long, reasonably complex sentences. Now imagine it's in a second language, you're in your first year of high school, and you're not allowed to use a script. (I did: at a decent pace, with short pauses between lines, I read the dialogue in just under 30 seconds. That's with roughly 23 years of speaking experience, and using a script that I wrote.) You can see where this is going.
Not surprisingly, the average time for the students was about 6 minutes. Very few of you understand how painful it is to listen to an ESL student stumble through reasonably difficult memorized English in a cold hallway. After beginning class, last-minute recaps of the test, passing out grade sheets, working out who would go first, and getting my little table set up, 50 minutes turned into barely 40. Each class averaged 8 students left over at the end.
Despite the logistical catastrophe, everything went fairly well. Nobody got mad at me for running over on time; we simply had the extra students come after school and take their test. The worse groups of students averaged 6 or 7 minutes of stammering, broken English, but the better ones did indeed come pretty close to the 2'30" mark. It also gave me the chance to talk one-on-one with the students, a first in most cases.
I should have cut each student off at 2'30", but I simply couldn't bring myself to do it. I eventually saw the futility and made a deal with myself: if they were silent for more than 10 seconds, we moved on to the next line, but as long as they were talking--no matter how slowly--we'd keep going. As you can imagine, it's that last part that killed me. I'll fight tooth and nail to keep the kids from having to learn that much material for such a short test session again.
After the initial planning, the test became entirely mine. The most the teachers talked to me about the test was when they'd ask how it was going, or when I'd ask them for their thoughts on the setup. They weren't anywhere near me when I gave the test, so I was able to grade the students entirely on my own. This allowed me to judge what were and were not acceptable deviations to the script--"Hi" instead of "Hello" was fine, but "would you like go to fishing" wasn't, etc.
Afterwards, I collected the grade sheets, and made a spreadsheet out of them. The kids also get participation points during class, and those points are factored in as a bonus on their final exam score. I added those points to the same spreadsheet. It's very simple procedural stuff, sure, but it's nonetheless my first experience grading a test. The overall average is about 80%, which is no doubt helped by the fact that the students were given about double the time originally planned for the test.
Man, I'm learning a lot about this whole teaching thing. I'm still terribly inexperienced, and in no shape to be a fully independent teacher, but I'm so much better than I was in August, and I'm absolutely loving it here.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Overdue posts on dated events, part 1
(I wrote this a few weeks ago--honest!--and forgot to post it. Here it is, with relative times not adjusted.)
Last weekend the Tsushima JETs got together on the northern part of the island to celebrate Joey's birthday. (Joey's the one who reminds me a lot of Chuck when we first met.) Getting somewhere outside of my town without getting a ride from someone else is always an adventure, since I still stubbornly refuse to get a car. Thankfully, the island has a modest bus system, and it runs the same routes on the weekend as it does during the week. The plan for Saturday was for some of us to get together with Joey and hike Mitake, one of the many mountains around here, then have a barbecue and bonfire on the beach. So I woke up Saturday morning and caught the same bus I catch to my second high school. I made it there, met up with Mitch and Mike, who were driving up the rest of the way to Mitake. We hung out for a little while before taking off, and took our time getting there. Along the way, we found the best city park playground I've ever seen. Seriously, it was amazing, mostly because of its randomness: it's in the middle of Tsushima, which is very sparsely populated, even by the island's standards. The park features go-karts, a really cool playground, and two awesome slides. (Pictures)
We hiked Mitake, which is reportedly 492 meters tall. I've hiked about two mountains in my lifetime, so I had no idea how high 492 meters was. Turned out to be an hour or so up at a leisurely pace. Along the way we found a shrine beside a little brook, and several huge uprooted trees. The summit was adorned with little altars with stone figurines in them. The kanji written on them was apparently pretty archaic--Joey's Japanese friend from Fukuoka couldn't make out what they said. We found a more secluded outcropping alongside the summit that gave a much better view. (Pictures)
That night, we got together on the beach for a barbecue and a bonfire. We stocked up on hamburgers, hot dogs, buns, ketchup, and mustard, none of which I expected to find at a grocery store in rural Japan. Everyone brought various scraps of paper and cardboard which, combined with driftwood collected from the beach, made a toasty bonfire. Joey's little grill worked beautifully, despite having to use fireplace kindling to light it. (Nobody sold charcoal, and when our designated Kerosene Purchaser went to buy some lighter fluid, the grocery store staff talked him out of it.) Once we got it up and going, though, the whole setting was beautiful: roaring bonfire, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, fireworks, and anglophones, all against a backdrop of starry autumn sky, crashing waves, and fishing boats on the horizon. (Pictures!)
The next weekend was Evelyn's birthday. She's much more low-key than Joey, so we all got together for a relatively tame night of dinner and bowling. The lowest score in our first game was a 120--and that wasn't mine! I got a 135. There aren't many pictures, but here they are!
I also bought my plane ticket home! (You don't want to know how much it cost.) My flight leaves Japan at noon on Saturday, December 22nd, and arrives in America at 10 am on Saturday, December 22nd. I won't actually get to Springfield until 8:30 that night, so by then I will have spent 19 hours on planes, and a total of 24 hours traveling. Hopefully I'll get adjusted to US time before I have to fly back here on January 8th. I'm also definitely stopping over in Georgia, but it won't be for very long. Better than nothing, though! Woohoo!
Last weekend the Tsushima JETs got together on the northern part of the island to celebrate Joey's birthday. (Joey's the one who reminds me a lot of Chuck when we first met.) Getting somewhere outside of my town without getting a ride from someone else is always an adventure, since I still stubbornly refuse to get a car. Thankfully, the island has a modest bus system, and it runs the same routes on the weekend as it does during the week. The plan for Saturday was for some of us to get together with Joey and hike Mitake, one of the many mountains around here, then have a barbecue and bonfire on the beach. So I woke up Saturday morning and caught the same bus I catch to my second high school. I made it there, met up with Mitch and Mike, who were driving up the rest of the way to Mitake. We hung out for a little while before taking off, and took our time getting there. Along the way, we found the best city park playground I've ever seen. Seriously, it was amazing, mostly because of its randomness: it's in the middle of Tsushima, which is very sparsely populated, even by the island's standards. The park features go-karts, a really cool playground, and two awesome slides. (Pictures)
We hiked Mitake, which is reportedly 492 meters tall. I've hiked about two mountains in my lifetime, so I had no idea how high 492 meters was. Turned out to be an hour or so up at a leisurely pace. Along the way we found a shrine beside a little brook, and several huge uprooted trees. The summit was adorned with little altars with stone figurines in them. The kanji written on them was apparently pretty archaic--Joey's Japanese friend from Fukuoka couldn't make out what they said. We found a more secluded outcropping alongside the summit that gave a much better view. (Pictures)
That night, we got together on the beach for a barbecue and a bonfire. We stocked up on hamburgers, hot dogs, buns, ketchup, and mustard, none of which I expected to find at a grocery store in rural Japan. Everyone brought various scraps of paper and cardboard which, combined with driftwood collected from the beach, made a toasty bonfire. Joey's little grill worked beautifully, despite having to use fireplace kindling to light it. (Nobody sold charcoal, and when our designated Kerosene Purchaser went to buy some lighter fluid, the grocery store staff talked him out of it.) Once we got it up and going, though, the whole setting was beautiful: roaring bonfire, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, fireworks, and anglophones, all against a backdrop of starry autumn sky, crashing waves, and fishing boats on the horizon. (Pictures!)
The next weekend was Evelyn's birthday. She's much more low-key than Joey, so we all got together for a relatively tame night of dinner and bowling. The lowest score in our first game was a 120--and that wasn't mine! I got a 135. There aren't many pictures, but here they are!
I also bought my plane ticket home! (You don't want to know how much it cost.) My flight leaves Japan at noon on Saturday, December 22nd, and arrives in America at 10 am on Saturday, December 22nd. I won't actually get to Springfield until 8:30 that night, so by then I will have spent 19 hours on planes, and a total of 24 hours traveling. Hopefully I'll get adjusted to US time before I have to fly back here on January 8th. I'm also definitely stopping over in Georgia, but it won't be for very long. Better than nothing, though! Woohoo!
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Mid-Year Conference 2007
I had to bail early on pumpkin carving with my students last Wednesday because I had to make my flight to Nagasaki. Each year, all the JETs in each prefecture are brought together for a mid-year conference. There were about 166 of us for Nagasaki Prefecture. I met most of the other first-year JETs at the prefectural orientation back in August, but that already feels like years ago. It's pretty neat to observe all the cliques that have formed, and how people juggled time between ALT friends from their cities and other first-years they met back in August.
Evelyn's awesome, and booked most of our hotel rooms together. I am apparently the only one of the eight of us Tsushima JETs who had to work Wednesday, so the rest of them had spent most of the afternoon enjoying Nagasaki. There was typical craziness at a bar on the Dejima wharf, involving twenty Japanese college students who were celebrating four birthdays. Nothing too crazy, though.
The first day of the conference was kicked off with a keynote speech. The speaker was some guy who apparently heads up a camp around here for learning English. The content of his speech was probably pretty mediocre; however, having gone so long without such prolonged exposure to English, I basked in it. He talked about the history of Japan hiring foreigners to teach in the country, dating back to the Meiji Restoration, and went into a little philosophy, so the geek in me loved it.
All JETs, regardless of length of tenure, have to attend the conference and all its breakout sessions. This obviously leads to a lot of re-tread. I can understand the program's reasoning: something along the lines of rejuvenating the troops, trying to remind them of why they're here. I also can understand second- and third-years' being frustrated with being told the same thing time and again. So much of
what they tell us--even at the prefectural meetings--is woefully irrelevant to Tsushima. JET's mantra is "every situation is different," and with good reason. Gathering 166 people from different situations to try and teach them all the same discrete procedures seems kind of counterintuitive to many people, including me. However, we don't complain too loudly, for two reasons: a) the whole trip is paid for by our schools, and 2) we get to party with fellow anglophones.
With that in mind, I endured the first day's breakout sessions. I did in fact pick up a couple of useful game ideas. That I learned them from a pretty JET who loved to hear herself talk almost kept it from being worth the effort, though.
Oh, and JETs aren't the only ones who come to this conference. Also invited are our supervisors, the Japanese Teachers of English (JTEs). This becomes important later.
Anyway. The important stuff happened afterwards. There was a big party at a local bar back at the August orientation, with proceeds benefiting an English school in Laos. A sequel was planned for this conference, with a costume party tacked on. I hadn't brought my costume for two very good reasons: I didn't think anyone else would bring theirs, and I never really had a costume to begin with. Turns out, everyone else brought a costume. I wound up going as Guy in Pajamas, which worked well enough, in that I was the only guy wearing flannel pajamas and a hotel bathrobe. Other costumes in our little group included a pirate and Waldo. The girls in our group had planned costumes around some French cartoon or comic book or something. I dunno either.
The party was fun, but absolutely packed with people. Six or seven of us broke off from the main party and decided to find a quieter venue for some relaxing. After about an hour of "seriously, guys, it's just a little farther this way" from three different guides, we found the Panic Paradise. Our group had grown to about ten by then, and we were the only people in this cozy little bar. The bartender let us take over DJing, and most of the music played wound up being 80s rock. Everyone was singing along with Sweet Child O' Mine at one point. It was great.
The second day began with a third-year ALT leading a seminar on ideas for games. She'd had about six cups of coffee (by her own admission), and did not need the aid of the microphone she nevertheless kept pressed to her mouth the whole time. While Aaron and I were exchanging notes about how much we were suffering, I noticed that Evelyn didn't seem too bothered. In fact, she had a bemused little smile on her face. On closer inspection, it was revealed that she'd brought earplugs. I tried to talk her out of them, to no avail.
One of the breakout sessions that day was led by an anthropology student from UC Irvine. This marked the first time in the program that I've listened to an official who cites a background in anthro, so I was all ears. She was rather boring, but I didn't let it bother me too much (thanks especially to the frenetic lecture by coffee girl that morning). Her main point was the differences between Japanese and non-Japanese cultures. One of the highlights was the difference in attitudes regarding training and asking questions. Job training for most westerners entails a basic step-by-step outline to whatever the task is. We expect this, so we don't feel insulted by being led by the hand through something entirely new to us. According to her, in Japan, it's considered offensive to talk to someone as if they don't know what they're doing, even if they clearly don't know what they're doing. More on this later. Basic cultural relativism, specific examples
involving Japan, and personal anecdotes--all of which make for a perfectly fine half-hour lecture. The problem was that she'd been given an hour and some change.
My favorite breakout session of the conference was headed by the Prefectural Advisors (basically the two head JETs in the prefecture), Pene and Laura. This one included both JETs and JTEs. They wanted to facilitate discussion between us and our supervisors regarding each side's expectations of the other coming into the program, how those have changed, and what suggestions we could offer for the other.
I found several things very interesting. First of all, practically every other first-year JET mentioned how overwhelmed they felt when they first arrived, and how difficult it was to find their way. (This was before the session by the UC Irvine anthro girl, so I didn't yet know about the don't-talk-to-me-like-I'm-an-idiot resistance in Japan.) In response, the JTEs politely pointed out that we went through an orientation in our home country, three days of orientation in Tokyo when we arrived, and two more days of orientation in Nagasaki after that. In their minds, we had been given plenty of time to have our duties explained to us.
I found this fascinating. When it came time for us to suggest solutions to these problems, many people came up with similar ideas. The most common involved better communication. My way of phrasing it is this: let the JTEs know that we do not in fact have the slightest idea what we're doing, and have actually been cautioned by every official along the way to be prepared to learn from scratch, regardless of teaching experience. The JTEs should at the very least be proactive in communicating with us about our responsibilities. On the other hand, JETs should be prepared both to ask questions, no matter how stupid they may sound, and also accept that we know nothing about our job, and so should let our supervisors talk to us as a first-day trainee.
All in all, the official part of the conference was so-so. A lot of people were staying for the weekend in Nagasaki. I had been planning on doing so, but it didn't quite work out like that. More on that next post...
Evelyn's awesome, and booked most of our hotel rooms together. I am apparently the only one of the eight of us Tsushima JETs who had to work Wednesday, so the rest of them had spent most of the afternoon enjoying Nagasaki. There was typical craziness at a bar on the Dejima wharf, involving twenty Japanese college students who were celebrating four birthdays. Nothing too crazy, though.
The first day of the conference was kicked off with a keynote speech. The speaker was some guy who apparently heads up a camp around here for learning English. The content of his speech was probably pretty mediocre; however, having gone so long without such prolonged exposure to English, I basked in it. He talked about the history of Japan hiring foreigners to teach in the country, dating back to the Meiji Restoration, and went into a little philosophy, so the geek in me loved it.
All JETs, regardless of length of tenure, have to attend the conference and all its breakout sessions. This obviously leads to a lot of re-tread. I can understand the program's reasoning: something along the lines of rejuvenating the troops, trying to remind them of why they're here. I also can understand second- and third-years' being frustrated with being told the same thing time and again. So much of
what they tell us--even at the prefectural meetings--is woefully irrelevant to Tsushima. JET's mantra is "every situation is different," and with good reason. Gathering 166 people from different situations to try and teach them all the same discrete procedures seems kind of counterintuitive to many people, including me. However, we don't complain too loudly, for two reasons: a) the whole trip is paid for by our schools, and 2) we get to party with fellow anglophones.
With that in mind, I endured the first day's breakout sessions. I did in fact pick up a couple of useful game ideas. That I learned them from a pretty JET who loved to hear herself talk almost kept it from being worth the effort, though.
Oh, and JETs aren't the only ones who come to this conference. Also invited are our supervisors, the Japanese Teachers of English (JTEs). This becomes important later.
Anyway. The important stuff happened afterwards. There was a big party at a local bar back at the August orientation, with proceeds benefiting an English school in Laos. A sequel was planned for this conference, with a costume party tacked on. I hadn't brought my costume for two very good reasons: I didn't think anyone else would bring theirs, and I never really had a costume to begin with. Turns out, everyone else brought a costume. I wound up going as Guy in Pajamas, which worked well enough, in that I was the only guy wearing flannel pajamas and a hotel bathrobe. Other costumes in our little group included a pirate and Waldo. The girls in our group had planned costumes around some French cartoon or comic book or something. I dunno either.
The party was fun, but absolutely packed with people. Six or seven of us broke off from the main party and decided to find a quieter venue for some relaxing. After about an hour of "seriously, guys, it's just a little farther this way" from three different guides, we found the Panic Paradise. Our group had grown to about ten by then, and we were the only people in this cozy little bar. The bartender let us take over DJing, and most of the music played wound up being 80s rock. Everyone was singing along with Sweet Child O' Mine at one point. It was great.
The second day began with a third-year ALT leading a seminar on ideas for games. She'd had about six cups of coffee (by her own admission), and did not need the aid of the microphone she nevertheless kept pressed to her mouth the whole time. While Aaron and I were exchanging notes about how much we were suffering, I noticed that Evelyn didn't seem too bothered. In fact, she had a bemused little smile on her face. On closer inspection, it was revealed that she'd brought earplugs. I tried to talk her out of them, to no avail.
One of the breakout sessions that day was led by an anthropology student from UC Irvine. This marked the first time in the program that I've listened to an official who cites a background in anthro, so I was all ears. She was rather boring, but I didn't let it bother me too much (thanks especially to the frenetic lecture by coffee girl that morning). Her main point was the differences between Japanese and non-Japanese cultures. One of the highlights was the difference in attitudes regarding training and asking questions. Job training for most westerners entails a basic step-by-step outline to whatever the task is. We expect this, so we don't feel insulted by being led by the hand through something entirely new to us. According to her, in Japan, it's considered offensive to talk to someone as if they don't know what they're doing, even if they clearly don't know what they're doing. More on this later. Basic cultural relativism, specific examples
involving Japan, and personal anecdotes--all of which make for a perfectly fine half-hour lecture. The problem was that she'd been given an hour and some change.
My favorite breakout session of the conference was headed by the Prefectural Advisors (basically the two head JETs in the prefecture), Pene and Laura. This one included both JETs and JTEs. They wanted to facilitate discussion between us and our supervisors regarding each side's expectations of the other coming into the program, how those have changed, and what suggestions we could offer for the other.
I found several things very interesting. First of all, practically every other first-year JET mentioned how overwhelmed they felt when they first arrived, and how difficult it was to find their way. (This was before the session by the UC Irvine anthro girl, so I didn't yet know about the don't-talk-to-me-like-I'm-an-idiot resistance in Japan.) In response, the JTEs politely pointed out that we went through an orientation in our home country, three days of orientation in Tokyo when we arrived, and two more days of orientation in Nagasaki after that. In their minds, we had been given plenty of time to have our duties explained to us.
I found this fascinating. When it came time for us to suggest solutions to these problems, many people came up with similar ideas. The most common involved better communication. My way of phrasing it is this: let the JTEs know that we do not in fact have the slightest idea what we're doing, and have actually been cautioned by every official along the way to be prepared to learn from scratch, regardless of teaching experience. The JTEs should at the very least be proactive in communicating with us about our responsibilities. On the other hand, JETs should be prepared both to ask questions, no matter how stupid they may sound, and also accept that we know nothing about our job, and so should let our supervisors talk to us as a first-day trainee.
All in all, the official part of the conference was so-so. A lot of people were staying for the weekend in Nagasaki. I had been planning on doing so, but it didn't quite work out like that. More on that next post...
First Halloween Lessons
In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, we moved from Florida to Missouri. My English II class that year was run by Mrs. Rowe, whose uncanny resemblance to Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" she actually endorsed with a giant poster in her classroom. The poster featured the Church Lady striking her most self-righteous pose, and was captioned "Well, Isn't That Special?"
She was the first of many teachers to try and get me to perform some wretched act called "prewriting." This requires one to actually plan out one's writing in an organized fashion, followed by composing the actual essay in a similarly regimented manner. This confused the daylights out of me at the time, and for many years afterwards. My time in high school (just like that of most of the people I know) was defined by starting on an assignment no more than one day before it was due. (Two, if it involved painting.) I most often waited until the night before, right around normal bedtime, and the anxiety of not getting it done and therefore failing would compel me to work. Fueled by the adrenaline, I'd stay up as long as it took to get the thing done, whatever it was.
I managed to use this model to perfection up through senior year: my crowning achievement was producing a twelve-page term paper on Franz Kafka the night before it was due. Before I could begin the paper that night, I had to do all the research I was supposed to have been doing over the previous six weeks. Six hours and eight cans of Mountain Dew later, I had succeeded. The paper got an A, which is especially nice considering it was for my AP Literature class.
It wasn't until my Freshman Composition class at UGA that I learned what everyone does, often sooner than I did: that you can't produce truly good papers by waiting until the night before. Having learned that much, I assumed that was all there was to be gleaned from that lesson, and I modified my strategy: I thenceforth began my writing assignments three days before they were due. Eventually, though, I discovered that prewriting is in fact a valuable tool, and not (as I smugly maintained for so long) a crutch for the inept.
I tell all of this because if the me from the day after I wrote the Kafka paper met the me from right now, he'd (I'd?) probably punch him (me?) in the face. I'm such a prewriting geek that I now begin these blogs with a rough outline of what I need to say. I'm such a nerd.
Anyway. Halloween was fun this year, all things considered. Though it was pretty slapdash at the beginning, my Halloween lesson for my high schoolers was, by the ninth or tenth time teaching it, decently cohesive. I began by showing the opening song from The Nightmare Before Christmas ("Halloween Town") in Japanese, courtesy of YouTube. Then I asked each class what they knew about Halloween. This produced a list of vocabulary ranging from three to twelve words long. The worst class only got "Halloween," "candy," and "trick or treat;" the best went as far as "grim reaper" and "Cerberus." (Seriously--a 15-year-old Japanese boy tossed "Cerberus" in with Halloween. He pronounced it with a hard C, which is faithful to the Greek pronunciation, but I learned it incorrectly, with a soft C, so I thought he was saying "Care Bears" at first.)
I initially had pretty high hopes for what would come next, including teaching the kids about the Celtic holiday Samhain, the evolution of the word "Halloween" from "All Hallows Evening," the story of Jack o'Lantern, and the ins and outs of trick-or-treating. You can probably imagine the looks of shock and fear on my fellow teachers' faces as I pitched this lesson plan to them. Suffice it to say, the end result was toned down quite a bit. I had to settle for a three-sentence breakdown of Samhain: "2,000 years ago, people lived in Ireland. These people believed that once a year, on October 31st, dead people could come back to life. People were scared of them, so some wore costumes to try and scare the dead away." That's the best compromise I could strike between all the trawling I did on the Internet and what the students would actually understand. Even this much had to be given slowly.
Several of my teachers, trying to be helpful, likened the Samhain festival to the Japanese Buddhist festival O-bon. While both are festivals involving the return of the dead to the earth, all the research I've done has shown that while the Gaels feared the return of the deceased on Samhain, O-bon is a much more welcoming celebration of one's ancestors. I think one of us misrepresented our holidays, and I'm pretty sure it was me. Oh, well. The history isn't so much crucial to the understanding of Halloween as it is simply interesting.
Next, I talked about pumpkin carving. Telling the story of Jack o'Lantern would likely lose all its effect in translation for the students, so I settled for pointing out the distinction between a pumpkin and a jack-o-lantern. I showed lots of pictures I found of different jack-o-lanterns, and explained how to carve a pumpkin, complete with drawings on the board and sound effects for popping open and gutting a pumpkin. The kids absolutely loved all of this. With my second, smaller high school, I brought a green Japanese pumpkin I had carved, and showed it to the students after explaining carving. At this school, I have a class of seven third-year commercial-track students that I've talked about before. The teacher and I decided to have the students carve some pumpkins. I went to the grocery store, bought four more green pumpkins, and carved out three of them for the class to use. The fourth I purposefully left unhollowed so the kids could hear the juicy ripping sound it makes when you tear off the top. I tried to get them to stick their hands in and scoop out the guts, but had to settle for them using a spoon. I had to dart out early, so I only snapped one picture.
The most important thing I learned from this little unit has nothing to do with the holiday itself. This was the first time I've known exactly what I wanted to teach the kids, and felt no pressure or stress about whether or not the students would understand. Of course, the deck was stacked in my favor: the students already know little snippets about Halloween, I showed lots of pictures, we played games, and I gave them candy. Even so, it felt amazing to be able to relish the sheer joy of teaching something. I take it as a preview of how everyday teaching could one day be for me, once I get past all the crazy lesson planning.
Pictures!
She was the first of many teachers to try and get me to perform some wretched act called "prewriting." This requires one to actually plan out one's writing in an organized fashion, followed by composing the actual essay in a similarly regimented manner. This confused the daylights out of me at the time, and for many years afterwards. My time in high school (just like that of most of the people I know) was defined by starting on an assignment no more than one day before it was due. (Two, if it involved painting.) I most often waited until the night before, right around normal bedtime, and the anxiety of not getting it done and therefore failing would compel me to work. Fueled by the adrenaline, I'd stay up as long as it took to get the thing done, whatever it was.
I managed to use this model to perfection up through senior year: my crowning achievement was producing a twelve-page term paper on Franz Kafka the night before it was due. Before I could begin the paper that night, I had to do all the research I was supposed to have been doing over the previous six weeks. Six hours and eight cans of Mountain Dew later, I had succeeded. The paper got an A, which is especially nice considering it was for my AP Literature class.
It wasn't until my Freshman Composition class at UGA that I learned what everyone does, often sooner than I did: that you can't produce truly good papers by waiting until the night before. Having learned that much, I assumed that was all there was to be gleaned from that lesson, and I modified my strategy: I thenceforth began my writing assignments three days before they were due. Eventually, though, I discovered that prewriting is in fact a valuable tool, and not (as I smugly maintained for so long) a crutch for the inept.
I tell all of this because if the me from the day after I wrote the Kafka paper met the me from right now, he'd (I'd?) probably punch him (me?) in the face. I'm such a prewriting geek that I now begin these blogs with a rough outline of what I need to say. I'm such a nerd.
Anyway. Halloween was fun this year, all things considered. Though it was pretty slapdash at the beginning, my Halloween lesson for my high schoolers was, by the ninth or tenth time teaching it, decently cohesive. I began by showing the opening song from The Nightmare Before Christmas ("Halloween Town") in Japanese, courtesy of YouTube. Then I asked each class what they knew about Halloween. This produced a list of vocabulary ranging from three to twelve words long. The worst class only got "Halloween," "candy," and "trick or treat;" the best went as far as "grim reaper" and "Cerberus." (Seriously--a 15-year-old Japanese boy tossed "Cerberus" in with Halloween. He pronounced it with a hard C, which is faithful to the Greek pronunciation, but I learned it incorrectly, with a soft C, so I thought he was saying "Care Bears" at first.)
I initially had pretty high hopes for what would come next, including teaching the kids about the Celtic holiday Samhain, the evolution of the word "Halloween" from "All Hallows Evening," the story of Jack o'Lantern, and the ins and outs of trick-or-treating. You can probably imagine the looks of shock and fear on my fellow teachers' faces as I pitched this lesson plan to them. Suffice it to say, the end result was toned down quite a bit. I had to settle for a three-sentence breakdown of Samhain: "2,000 years ago, people lived in Ireland. These people believed that once a year, on October 31st, dead people could come back to life. People were scared of them, so some wore costumes to try and scare the dead away." That's the best compromise I could strike between all the trawling I did on the Internet and what the students would actually understand. Even this much had to be given slowly.
Several of my teachers, trying to be helpful, likened the Samhain festival to the Japanese Buddhist festival O-bon. While both are festivals involving the return of the dead to the earth, all the research I've done has shown that while the Gaels feared the return of the deceased on Samhain, O-bon is a much more welcoming celebration of one's ancestors. I think one of us misrepresented our holidays, and I'm pretty sure it was me. Oh, well. The history isn't so much crucial to the understanding of Halloween as it is simply interesting.
Next, I talked about pumpkin carving. Telling the story of Jack o'Lantern would likely lose all its effect in translation for the students, so I settled for pointing out the distinction between a pumpkin and a jack-o-lantern. I showed lots of pictures I found of different jack-o-lanterns, and explained how to carve a pumpkin, complete with drawings on the board and sound effects for popping open and gutting a pumpkin. The kids absolutely loved all of this. With my second, smaller high school, I brought a green Japanese pumpkin I had carved, and showed it to the students after explaining carving. At this school, I have a class of seven third-year commercial-track students that I've talked about before. The teacher and I decided to have the students carve some pumpkins. I went to the grocery store, bought four more green pumpkins, and carved out three of them for the class to use. The fourth I purposefully left unhollowed so the kids could hear the juicy ripping sound it makes when you tear off the top. I tried to get them to stick their hands in and scoop out the guts, but had to settle for them using a spoon. I had to dart out early, so I only snapped one picture.
The most important thing I learned from this little unit has nothing to do with the holiday itself. This was the first time I've known exactly what I wanted to teach the kids, and felt no pressure or stress about whether or not the students would understand. Of course, the deck was stacked in my favor: the students already know little snippets about Halloween, I showed lots of pictures, we played games, and I gave them candy. Even so, it felt amazing to be able to relish the sheer joy of teaching something. I take it as a preview of how everyday teaching could one day be for me, once I get past all the crazy lesson planning.
Pictures!
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