3 October 2011 / Irena Sonc Šlenc

We started the class by checking the homework in workbooks. Pairs had to talk about which five exercises in the workbook they chose to do over the weekend and why. Some students did much more than five but some, as always, didn't do anything at all. After a tour around the class to see what pupils did I picked the first three students to be graded for their knowledge of the Past Simple Tense. One was quite fluent but didn't revise the irregular verbs and could not produce a proper wh- question in the past, for which I gave a three. The second was completely unprepared and hardly produced a correct sentence in the Past, so I gave him a two. The third student pretty fluently retold the story of Discovery of America but cheated by reading from the text and he didn't know a couple of irregular verbs, for which I gave him a four (it would be fairer to give him a three, maybe, but on the spot it is hard to decide without having in mind what he produces during the lessons). I thought giving a one-week notice in advance about grading would make students at least open the books, but it turns out that some are still only motivated at the end of the year when they want good final grades. Well, we'll see...
After the grading (which took too much time) we embarked a new topic in our course books, namely on stereotypes. A group of students made too much noise so we had to skip the introduction, which should be a pair discussion about the best and worst things about America (in level 3 group it turned out quite interesting pair work). We continued by clearing out the meanings of a couple of expressions that appear in the text Are We All Americans Now. I let the students listen to the recording and circle all verbs in the text at the same time. Hopefully, they noticed that this part of Unit 1 is about the Present Simple Tense. We were running out of time again (mostly because some believe it is more fun to throw little pieces of anything around the class or still someone's pencil case just to annoy them) so I had to leave the students with homework on reading comprehension (exercise 4 in the CB), which is actually meant to be done in school.
At the end Anže, who didn't write last post, picked the next blogger and here I am, posting for the second level Monday class.
See you soon.