IrishOboe

This week was a great week at work in terms of classes. We’re working on a project for this term’s exam rather than preparing for a written test (a strange tradition for an Oral Communication class). Students are writing a dialogue with a partner, the topic and content solely of their choosing (though I gave plenty of examples to help the less creative). During class the Japanese teacher and I go around helping kids translate their dialogues into English. I think it was a brilliant trick of mine to tell them to write a dialogue in Japanese then translate it. They were free to write about what was interesting to them; then they had a real interest in learning how to express those ideas in English. It’s been a lot of fun and the students have really opened up to me. The least promising students have done very creative work and almost all of them work hard in class. Who says you can’t give freedom to high school kids for a full 50 minutes? (More)