A few personal lessons from an Elementary and an Advance class.

Since returning from the Christmas holidays I have been fortunate enough to widen the range of levels that I have been teaching. As such I now have taught all the way from Elementary to Advance as well as some children's groups and some business classes. I would certainly say that this has helped me understand the differences between all the levels and helped with grading my language across all the levels [or un-grading in the case of Advance]. 

I have noticed some interesting things about learning styles that I want to comment upon here.

1. Advance students can recognise, understand when to use and know how to construct a certain grammar point and yet still avoid using it. 

I covered some Advance groups that were experiencing problems with using conditionals. To start my lesson I decided to test how much they knew and so asked them some questions about their dreams goals, how they would achieve them etc to get them to use conditionals. Some of these students came up with very complicated ways to avoid using conditionals and only a couple [across 3 classes] seamed to use them naturally. 

However when it came to stating the grammar, the rules, the structures etc the students had no problem. I then asked them to use conditionals to talk about  the questions we had previously covered and they set to the task with enthusiasm. 

By the next lesson I found out that they were still avoiding using conditionals and that in fact they didn't recognise some of the more complicated forms. As such the challenge of getting students to use grammar points continues.

2. Confidence is important

I had a class of elementary students who were going over questions and short form responses for "where are you from?" and similar questions regarding country and nationality.

One student started of very enthusiastically and could remember the different nationalities very well but did confuse some countries with nationalities [i.e German/Germany]. However later on in the class she made a mistake with nationality and country, I pointed out the mistake and the difference between the two to her on her own. She lost confidence, changed some of her correct answers and then asked many other students what the answer was and didn't believe their answers frequently saying "I don't understand nothing" in Russian. 

Because of her lack of confidence she didn't believe she did anything right and found it very hard to continue learning. I've certainly learnt an important lesson about being more careful over instant feedback to a student and insuring I install confidence in my students over their abilities.

What would you like to know?

Do you have a burning question about the Ukraine? Russian language? Something about me perhaps? then ask it bellow and I shall answer it via some form of media. You can choose to get a video response using Vyou or get a text via Formspring or a full blogged response using the comments section. 

So come on. ask me a question.

A quick reflection and update: 21/02/2011

Today's blog shall be very short as I have a few writing activities that I must do. These included the first of my International House Young learners course, A guest Blog post...well sort of. [more to be revealed later] an online training course, AND I need to do my regular planning as well. This is part of the reason for the brevity of the post today and will simply be a little update with some thoughts.

Work has become much more time consuming and the fact the office is further away from my house means that I end up spending the whole day out of the class [and I now have every day from 8-8 apart from Monday when I finish at 6:30.]

The weekend once again flew by with several highlights [not the basketball this week though!] including an amazing lunch with the other teachers, inventing a new Russian word [when trying to ask for the spiciest chilli a man had] and a very good sermon [once again] at Nadesda church.

I still haven't done the video I said I would and I am contemplating removing videos from my aims, I shall continue to reflect on this though.

The month is nearly over! This means I only have four months left on my contract! Where has the time gone!

Mobile internet can be really slow.

Hopefully the next post will be longer and more thought out. please comment or ask me a question.

Why are words embarrassing?

As you may have seen from my 2011 years aims I am trying to write a song a month for the year to recap on my previous passion for writing songs. One of the things I have finally got round to using is a moleskin music notebook that my sister gave me as a present a few years back. I haven't used it until now as it is note based and most things I had wrote were chord and lyrically based and so I didn't need to use it. However recently I realised I could still use it for this in addition to normal note writing as such I have started carrying it around with me in the hope of capturing a moments inspiration.
During a class a student noticed my notebook and asked what it was, I had no problems explaining what it was and felt completely comfortable about him looking through at the notes that had been scribbled in place. What struck me was that if I had written some lyrics in this book then I would have hated him looking through it! For some reason my words embarrass me.
As you may remember this isn't unique to song lyrics it is also present in my blog post and I frequently feel uneasy knowing friends have read what I have written and are dissecting ever word I put down in a post.
What compounds this strangeness of this situation is that really, words are even the most common from of communication we have. What we DO actually reveals a lot about ourselves, what we value, and what we think about issues and people.
So why are words so embarrassing?

Seven Signs Advert

My good friend Andrew Brims [over on Brimming over blog] is starting a new Vlog series next week. I whole recommend it.