Free TESOL Training Course

EFLClassroom has put up a Free self-guided TESOL Training course developed by the US Department of Education and the University of Oregon. 

It's an open-source course featuring videos from classrooms all over the world. Unfortunately it's not accredited, but if you're just looking for some work-related self-improvement, then it's a great resource (did I mention FREE?) for you.

Check out the course here.

Marco Polo In the Classroom, or, "Oh my God there's so much blood!"

It started innocently enough. I just wanted to plan a simple classroom game that got the students to move but required them to use English to play.

If you never played "Marco Polo" in the swimming pool when you were younger, well, you probably didn't grow up in America. Marco Polo is a blind-man tag game based on hearing only. In the game, one kid - eyes closed - is "It". Whenever he yells "Marco!" the rest of the players must yell "Polo!", unless they are underwater. When "It" finds and tags another player, that kid becomes "It" and the game continues until Mom is ready to go home or someone wants to play a better game like "Sharks and Minnows".
 

Cartoon used by special permission
off the mark / one-a-day calendars

I thought this was a great set-up for an English-speaking game in the classroom. In "Classroom Marco Polo", one kid is "It". Everyone moves around in a designated space until "It" yells "Stop!" Then "It" must ask a practiced question like "What's your name?" or "What's your favorite food?" The other players must answer as many times as the question is asked.

"It" can take one giant step in any direction to try to tag another player. The other players can move their bodies to avoid being touched, but if they move their feet they become "It".

In the cut-throat version of the game, whenever a student is tagged, he becomes "It" but then must leave the game after tagging another player. The last player left without being tagged is the winner.

Unfortunately, whenever you let repressed, over-disciplined high school students - especially boys - loose in a game that involves blindness and physical contact, accidents are bound to happen. Glasses will get knocked across the room; kids will fall down; and one boy will swing his hand around wildly until he punches another boy in the mouth and splits his lip, which erupts into a crimson geyser across tables, chairs, and the floor. Seriously. So much blood.

I slowed down the bleeding with a wad of toilet paper and took the boy to the teacher's office, where they called his mom. All I really understood from the rushed conversation was "waygook shigan", or "foreigner time", so I had to fill in the rest of the conversation for myself. It went something like

"Hi, this is I-dong High School. Your son was in class with our foreigner-in-residence and now he's bleeding to death. Please come pick him up."

Personally, I didn't think the cut looked that bad. It just bled a lot. But I saw him the next day, after his visit to the hospital, and his lip was bandaged up so heavily he could barely speak.

Classroom Marco Polo Rule #1: No punching.

Alliteration is Awesome!

Today I introduced a new lesson plan called "Alliteration is Awesome!" And it was. Once, at least.

Over the last two weeks the classes have been learning and playing "Scattergories," one of my favorite word games ever. If you don't know about it, go play it now. It's up there with Boggle and Scrabble.

In the classroom, all of my students have loved it - even the lowest level boys go screaming-wild crazy over defending their answers, or attacking the answers of the other teams.

Today, after playing Scattegories for the last two classes, I taught my highest-level freshmen girls' class a new activity called "Alliteration is Awesome." It was one of the most memorable classes that I've ever taught. The girls were as creative, energetic, and enthusiastic as I've ever seen them. Of course, it was a high level class, and they were girls, and they usually have quite good energy anyway. We'll see how it plays out in the other 19 classes I teach. For now, though, I'm enjoying the momentary high.

The point of sharing this with you, though, was not to talk about me and my brilliant new lesson plan. I wanted to share the two-sentence stories that the girls came up with in the activity, to show you just how creative and funny they can be. I gave them points for the number of M's used, creativity, and grammatical correctness. People often say that Korean students have trouble thinking outside the box. I think they just haven't gotten the opportunity.

Here are their stories, to illustrate alliteration with the letter "M" (with only minor edits by yours truly):

Team 1

Mickey Mouse and my model mother ordered more and more medium steak and mustard sauce by mobile phone in the metro on Monday.

Team 2

Miss A and Mighty Mouse met in the membership club to show their music on Monday. Marc Jacobs made marble macaroni and took the metro at midnight. He gave the marble macaroni to male mammoths.

Team 3

Many monsters’ mothers and Magneto’s model mom made a party called “Merry X-Mas in Mexico.” At midnight Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse met a mini monkey’s mama who was eating miracle meat with mushrooms, which was the main menu in Mary’s mild room until next morning.

Team 4

My mother’s monkey, the monkey’s mom, Mickey Mouse and the main male model Mike made a milk shake and a meal in the mountain on Monday morning. The monster and Minnie Mouse met many members of Mickey Mouse’s friends in Mexico City, Mexico on a Monday in March.

Team 5

Mandy Moore and Mary met in the Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse Garden while they were making Monkey Magic bags on Monday morning. Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse marry in the Mama & Papa nightlclub in Pohang in the morning.

Team 6

Many monkeys and their moms meet other mother monkeys and father monkeys at the museum during Merry Christmas season. Min’s mom met Mike at the music shop to go see a musical and enjoy the moment. They went to see the movie “Mission Impossible” in which appear muscle boys.

$100,000 Pyramid: Hello, Lesson Plan!

Teaching in a high school in Korea doesn't have many perks compared with teaching middle or elementary school. Each class is 5-10 minutes longer (which quickly adds up - this means over the course of a week I teach 220 minutes - over 3 1/2 hours - more than an elementary teacher), we get fewer days off, we often have larger classes (36-45), and we have to develop our own lesson plans.

This last point is both a blessing and a curse. For a seasoned teacher with a lot of lesson planning under his belt, this would definitely be a perk. For the rest of us, the large majority of native english speakers who come to teach in Korea, it can be a real headache, particularly if you're not just one to kick your feet up and hit the "play" button on a season of subtitled Simpsons episodes. And I'm not. Before you run off calling me a saint, I admit I've shown Simpsons videos to a handful of classes when I was tired, hungover, or when it was exam week and the students wanted to sleep. But I do actually care - not that my students become fluent in English, or even necessarily that they learn anything. I care that my class, my job, is USEFUL, if any student chooses to pay attention. And it takes a while to develop smart, interesting, engaging, challenging-but-not-too-challenging lessons every week that all 7 of my co-teachers value and will participate in.

This week my lesson consists of a game. You may be thinking now about how I just said I'm not one to kick my feet up and a game, you're now thinking, sounds like I'm doing just that. And in some ways, you'd be right - it's an easy lesson to administer. The kids do all of the work, while my co-teacher and I live it up like game show hosts, who get paid to smile and offer words of congratulations or condolence and award prizes to a winner. But it did actually take work: 4-5 hours to develop the game - a powerpoint of 90+ slides, each with its own picture - and another hour or two spent searching for a game that would be suitable for the classroom, encourage speaking, and build lateral thinking skills.

Anyway, the game. You may remember it from the 1973 original version hosted by Dick Clark, or the more recent spinoff featuring Donny Osmond: The $100,000 Pyramid.

The classroom version is a dumbed-down copy of the game show, with vocabulary words in the place of categories, and the format is altered to accomodate 36 students. We split the class into two teams, on opposite sides of the classroom, with a single table in the middle. On either side of the table sit three chairs - six in total; three with their backs to the projector screen, the other three facing it. The three "blind" students are trying to guess the word that goes with the picture on the screen behind them; the three "seeing" students are describing it to them. (Though the original game show version didn't include pictures, they are a tremendous help to students who need to visualize something that they can't otherwise describe.) The rest of the team is standing in line, waiting for the word to be guessed. When they get the answer, the team rotates - quickly, they only have 2-3 minutes to guess all five words - until the time is up or they get all the answers. Then they switch. The five words in each round are common to a category (things that are hot, foods, animals, celebrities, things you can't see, etc).

It's been a huge hit, and even the low-level classes get hyped for it. It's fun to see the expressions or comparisons that they make in order to get the "blind" students to the correct word. I try to guide them along for particularly difficult ones (unicycle, Antarctica) but often they surprise themselves by finding their own way to the answer. The Korean educational system lacks any inclination towards lateral thinking, and this is a perfect game to introduce it to them. It's also a great way to reinforce English terms that they are used to only seeing in paper or associating with the Korean equivalent - by being forced to try to explain it without their native language, even using guestures, it maintains its Englishness. 

One thing that it has definitely highlighted, though - in EVERY class - is their ignorance of English numbers. I start the lesson by putting the title of the game on the board, and asking them what game we are playing. "Pyramid!" someone will eventually yell. Yes, I say, but what Pyramid? After a few moments of silence..."Ten million!" Ummm...no. I write 10,000,000 on the board. "Ten thousand!" No. I write "100" on the board, and then "1,000". They guess it easily after that. It boggles my mind that they don't know their numbers - sure, the Korean number system is built in multiples of 10,000 (50,000 won is 5 man won, where man means 10,000 - it makes that initial innocent trip to the ATM very expensive). But I have only been studying Korean for a few months and I already know better than to make that mistake.

Anyway, this post wasn't intended to be a rant about how hopeless my students are. If anything, I have been impressed this week with how much my students have opened up. Normally shy students have been the stars of the game, and even the lowest level students have surprised themselves with the amount of English they know. If I could play this "game" every week I would.