Monday, June 14, 2010

My GA 1 Class

Last Friday, I taught my GA1 class how to set up an account with Blogger. Starting today, they will have three entries a week of varying topics to fill their blogs with, one being whatever topic they choose themselves. I hope that this encourages them to write more in English. These are four of the students who are most proficient in English at my language school and I know they are up for the challenge. Thanks to the ease of today's technology, it will now almost be effortless to keep track of my students' writing.

I was supposed to have been handing out journal topics to my students each time we met, which was three days a week. Frankly, however, I was out of ideas for them. This was the class that was always pushed to the back-burner during preparation times at work (which are often inadequate allotments) because it was the last class of the day. If I had no time to really think through the day's classwork, I had even less time to think of a writint prompt. With an uneasy groan, I would glance at the lesson plan and remember that I had once again forgotten a journal topic. Though I was sick of always running into class without one, I didn't know how to fix it.
In vain, I viewed the class as what lay between me and the time to go home. Inevitably, the kids saw it the same way.

The idea for this ongoing assignment suddenly materialized as I was finalizing one of my own blog entries late last week. As I sat at the computer editing, I thought about how fun my GA1 students, all 'tweens, might think this was. What if I simply turned their journal assignments into blog entries? I bounced the idea off Jack, my American co-worker, and he thought it might be good for the kids. I began to get more and more enthusiastic about the prospect of teaching my students something new, all while helping them to practice their English. As excitement and anticipation began to build, I decisively commented to myself that "it's happening" and I introduced the concept to my students that day.

I feel this decision will infuse life and energy back into what was once a stale class. I have felt so much like a paper-pusher as of late, just having students fill out worksheets so that they can complete a workbook without having learned the knowledge contained within it. What's the fun or engagement in that? GA1's Writer's Workbook, still part of the plethera of workbooks from the old curriculum, had "Write and Plan a Journal" on the agenda for last Friday's class. My plan to get my students blogging solidified when I discovered that. The Apostle Paul tells us to honor "the spirit of the law and not the letter." Who's to say that showing students how to journal online isn't still "writing and planning a journal," even though all the worksheet pages for the day might not have been used?

So far, the response has been positive. "So I am fun and happy," one of my students commented in her first blog entry of the project. "We can write English journal!!!" She put all of those exclamation points at the end--I didn't edit them in there. "I like my class," she went on. "I write my blogger everyday~I love my class and blogger."

The blessing in this for me personally is that I feel I can finally start using the writing knowledge I have to teach my kids here in Korea the conventions of writing in English. I almost feel like a full-grown editor as I comment on my students' work: Yes, your topic was good but the way you say this in English is--. I suppose the first order of business for them is to say it right and then work on larger concerns like structure and, oh, a thesis. It's quite the opposite of what I would be doing as a writing editor to native speakers. One step at a time, though, one step at a time.

2 comments:

  1. Good work Jennifer, Be glad to read and comment, Love GPB

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  2. Grandpa, I have a confession: This entry (as it stood when you first read it) was meant solely as a teaching tool for my class and not a real entry. But your comment inspired me tonight to share the story. I hope you like it. If you're interested in reading my students' work, let me know. Love you.

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