Some quick observations about tonight’s classes:

I feel that the kids have returned, if only temporarily, to reasonable order. After the nightmarish class I created a full-color handout with four rules in English and Spanish, got them to read and check each one, and to paste a copy in their notebook. I keep the other copy, signed by both of us. I don’t know why, but it seems to have been helpful. I have also threatened them, saying if they have too many infractions they get sent to Maestra Chavez. They don’t want that. I expected to have to remind them constantly of the rules, and to re-seat them, but so far all I’ve had to do is walk over to the board and point to the rule. Sure, they break the no talking rule, but they’re more conscious. On the white board I also put little boxes with their names in them, and put a tick when they’ve done something good. I realized that if they don’t do anything “good,” I have no way to register that, so today I started them with five each. I do it only when I notice something extraordinarily disruptive or cooperative. They balk — I wasn’t talking! — but I just go on. They don’t know enough English for me to explain the concept of guilt by association.

I don’t know what else I’m doing differently. After feeling very angry at and betrayed by them, I have stepped up my warmth and enthusiasm about seeing them. I’ve forced myself to forgive, and so it’s genuine. It’s now been three classes since the horrible day, and we’re holding steady. That’s why I didn’t want to give up. I was determined to get a handle on this. Now I have only two more class sessions with the little schkitters. I told Magda she could teach one, but I hope she doesn’t want to, and lets me finish my term. If not, I have only one class.

So: knowing when to quit, and when to continue: there were four exercises I wanted to get thru with the kids today, but it just wasn’t happening. Their language skills are too weak, and I’m trying to strengthen basic ones. I’m also trying to break up the intensity. It’s just too much for them to plow through. Today I began with a bunch of “fun” things, rather than charge right into the book. And I think that, while they made it harder to plow, it helped the mood of the class in general. I didn’t do only exercises based in grammar. I’d taken a photo of a mural in the museo de antropologia last weekend, of a bunch of extinct mammals: woolly mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers and the like. Inspired by one of my books, I revealed it little by little. Inspired by Sarah, I revealed it from the bottom up, so they could see feet and start to guess what they saw. We worked on pronunciation too, and I really hammed it up, like with the American English “r,” making sort of a growling sound. Each time they identified an animal I wrote its name on the board. Then (inspired by some other book) I gave them cards I’d divided into quarters, and had them pick four names from the board. Then I called off the names. Three of the five kids were winners. I realized I didn’t have any prizes, but remembered I had sort of a memory game I’d made but never used, so I handed those out. At the very end of class, I quietly gave the other two the same thing.

Only then did I begin the textbook. I spent a lot of time reviewing wh- questions. I’d thought we’d sort of gotten it last week, but the poor things need a lot more practice. So they weren’t able to do even the simplest exercise without a lot of help. And so I gave it, throwing us way off schedule. I corrected each kid one by one.  I hadn’t thought I’d be able to do that, because even though there are only five, they normally riot when something’s not happening center stage. They really aren’t capable of working in pairs yet because they mutiny, but I tried them on it for a few minutes and it was okay.

Then came an exercise i dreaded: where they had to interview each other, asking questions they’d written themselves. Usually this kind of exercise bores them after thirty seconds. But I had to give it a try. So I told each of them that they got to be a teacher for a few minutes. One by one I brought them up with me (with lots of gentle physical contact, like my arm on their shoulder) and they asked everyone their questions about the extinct and endangered animal of their choice. And while they had a very hard time listening, and I had to call them to order about a million times, it wasn’t BAD disorder. It was excessive enthusiasm. It went way longer than I wanted it to, and way longer than I thought their attention span could handle, but I felt it was worth the risk, so that everyone could have a turn at being teacher. And I’m glad I took the risk, because I think they got something out of it. I’m not sure what. But they were semi-engaged. I worked a lot on getting them to make answers in complete sentences. Then I asked them if they felt it was easy or difficult to be a teacher. Difficult!

That was one time I wanted to stop but pushed on. Right afterwards, I wanted to get them through the next exercise in the book but it just felt like too much, though they’d barely made any “progress.” Instead I did a listening exercise. I described a creature and they all drew it: “It has small round ears, sharp teeth, a tail longer than its body…” We were reviewing old body-part words, introducing some new ones (“whiskers”), making comparisons. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, but felt that something needed to come out of their hands. At first I had a very hard time explaining the exercise but with some bilingual efforts on my part and that of Ricardo and Raquel, we got the idea. At the end, it was just over. “What for,” sort of. So I had everyone show their picture and said, “Look at how different they all are. But you all drew the very same words!” I don’t know if they understood, but at least *I* felt like I’d found a conclusion. But really, I just think they need more time to play with the language: to think it’s not a series of disembodied exercises that have nothing to do with them and whose content they can’t control. I’m leaving here soon, and I want them not to hate learning English, and I want them to get at least a few fundamentals that they’ve long been missing. Working with a group for six weeks isn’t enough. One needs to build their confidence and trust. They speak as little English as possible. But I noticed a difference today. Though they always speak a lot of Spanish, they were trying hard to say things in English.

On to my adult class. I didn’t mean for this  just to be a reprise of my lesson plan, already posted here. Funny how my lesson plans never — not once — correspond with reality.

One thing I’ve started to do — I sort of did it all along, but not enough — is not only to write an agenda on the board but to explain the language goals of the class, even to the kids. I’ve done that for maybe two classes. I don’t know if it helps, but it feels right. Hard to do when the comprehension skills are limited.

So with the teen class, I’ve been sticking strictly to the book. Though their production skills are low, their comprehension is higher. They seem to like the structure of the book. Unlike the kids’ book, it’s heavily activity-based. Like the kids’ book, they’re tested on the exact content in the book. So there are these canned conversations which they’ll have to recall at test time. I can’t stand that shite. So what I’ve done when possible is to race through the canned stuff — I’m now using the audio tape when it says to, because I think it grounds them more than just more Ginna-talk — and skim over the words in the dialog. “Do you live here in the city?” “Uh-huh.” “Do you like it?” “Yeah. In my opinion, it’s the only place to live. There’s always something to do.” “I agree. It’s very exciting.” After listening to that, they’re supposed to “have a similar conversation with a partner.” Now, I understand that prompts and references are helpful, but this is so disembodied. So I wrote the Wh- words on the board and asked them to discuss with one another their favorite hobby, rather than the art scene in New York, as directed. Oh, and I had them do it as a different character. For last assignment, I’d given them a choice of faces from Pat Moran’s book, plus a few others I’d found online. I told them they needed to become that person, and answer as that character would. I don’t think that was effective with this group — hard enough to answer as themselves — but it gave us some fun as a group. One teenager had decided his face belonged to a 75-year-old retired man. But when I asked him what his favorite hobby was and he said “x-box,” the conversation got animated: you’re 75 and you play computer games? Where did you learn THAT? So the Q&A was more interesting than it might otherwise have been.

As far as knowing when to stop, I sensed we’d had enough on several occasions — not that they had enough time to grasp the material, not enough time for production and repetition — but as much as they could bear at the moment, at least in its current form. The most notable time I had to decide to stop was when I tried an exercise that had worked very well with my Saturday class: pick a proverb and state your opinion. It was particularly apt because our workbook had the students learning to express their thoughts: agreement and disagreement. After a great deal of consideration, I decided on this proverb, because it’s vocabulary was simple: The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Well. that just blew them right out of — or down into — the water. They had no idea what it meant. While I’d been looking for simple vocabulary, the construction was so convoluted and the idea so abstract that they were completely baffled. I let them struggle with it for a while, which was uncomfortable for me, but as Kim pointed out when she watched my teaching, sometimes people are on the verge of getting it, if I’d only give them a few more seconds. But no: this time, nothing was happening. I recited the proverb so intonation could make meaning clearer. Under the word “know” I wrote three different meanings for it in context: learn, realize, understand. No go. Seeing utter confusion and feeling like a horrible teacher, I cheerily said, Okay, let’s try an easier one. Why “The grass is always greener on the other side” came to me, I don’t know. Its syntax is easy, its vocab is easy, its concept easy. NOT. I tried to get people to line up on the opinion continuum but they had no clue what it meant, what they were to do, or why. What worked great for my other guys confounded these. Jaime, trying so hard to be cooperative, started talking about literal grass: that he believed that grass somewhere else is greener than it is here. His son, however, understood. He talked about how a Mexican man may go to the United States to look for a better life, only to find it’s no better there than here. A brilliant example. His father disagreed with him, because his father does some business in the US. But that’s not what his son was talking about. After several uneasy minutes — trying to figure out a graceful segue the hell out of there — I decided this was no time for grace and simply said, “Let’s do something else.” They were visibly relieved. I’d hammered it some, let enough time for ideas to sink it, but it was beyond where they are cognitively in English. I guess I learned if you’re gonna venture into the realm of the foggy abstract, you’d better set up a lot of safety holds. Or stay concrete for a bit longer.