If a Picture Could Paint a Thousand Words

First time working with LETs.
Dr. Trites lectures us on teaching listening and speaking. We do a group exercise of listening to a song and putting the typed-up lyrics in order. She said she made it a bit more difficult because of the native speakers. So I was a bit nonplussed to see James putting it together so easily while I could barely make out the lines. I told myself that I was looking at the slips of paper upside-down, but so was Bess. Then James said that he taught this song to his classes. Aha.

Microteaching. Interesting idea and good for training us to come up with lesson plans, as well as giving us a chance to see how we work with different LETs. Cathy, Candy, and I worked together. At first I wanted to come up with a completely new lesson on our own, but the LETs wanted to stick to the text book, which is fair since the jr high kids need to know the textbook material for the national exam. So we looked at a lesson that discussed basketball, and decided to make a lesson about forming sentences like "I like to play basketball during winter vacation." This would train the kids in pronoun usage, verbs (like, enjoy, hate, need, want), infinitives, names for activities, names of vacations, and possibly usage of during/on/over. Planning out the lesson was fine, but performing it got rocky since we hadn't discussed who'd be leading it. I spoke, but the words weren't on the board, so hard to explain. Suggestions: work in pronouns more, also include other times and places. Commendation: put words on board in format for use in sentences--good for low-level students.

Heard more about college entrance. Spoke with Linda about it. Most kids don't go to college, but many can get in--but to bad colleges. I asked Linda why she teaches English to all these kids if most won't make it to college, not even to high school. I was looking for an uplifting answer, but she laughed and said she didn't know.