Monday, September 10, 2007

damn

Classes went well, though I think my best class was my 8:50AM class. There was confusion about classrooms this morning; the 7:40 students had been told to go to two different rooms (303 or 208; I was told I was in 208), so quite a few of them were late (20 minutes late, in some cases) and we went overtime by ten minutes as a result. I'll be curious to see how many students remain tomorrow; we tend to see a lot of shuffling during the first two weeks: students who complain they're in the wrong level, students who simply drop, and students who register late.

Because we're doing content-based lessons focusing on sitcoms, I find myself swamped in transcription. It took me a total of four hours to transcribe the 29-minute pilot of "Friends," and while I got the major planning done over the weekend, I still need to craft exercises based on the transcript, audio, and video. We did some intro work on "Friends" today; it turns out that not all young Koreans know the series, which is surprising. Personally, I've seen only three episodes of "Friends" (including the episode I just transcribed), so this promises to be as much a learning experience for me as for some of the girls.

No, not girls-- not this time around: we've got one guy in the first class, and he kept bitching about how he disliked sitcoms and preferred shows like "Prison Break." I'm hoping he'll drop. We'll see.

I'm looking forward to meeting my CNN English class tomorrow. French class today could have gone better: only one student of the three on the list (we actually had four) had bothered to buy the book, and because the class runs from noon to 1PM, I was unable to grab extra books from the office: the office was closed and locked for lunch. That's unusual: the office staffers usually leave the door unlocked and eat inside the office. Murphy's Law, eh? The beginning of term is usually chaotic, so this was par for the course.

Right-- back to work.


_

2 comments:

Sean said...

Personally I hate friends - maybe that's why I don't have any: ha ha

anyhow for TV transcripts the site to use is twiztv. You can get transcripts of all 10 seasons of friends.

Good luck with the class - it's a lot of work to prepare tv for EFL, but well worth the effort when done and also when re-used in future classes.

You'll still need to go through the show and transcript as there are errors. They are not professionally done, but rather done by fans. I use this site for all the shows I've done with students in the past: Smallville, Prison Break, Lost etc..

Kevin Kim said...

Fantastic. This will save me a bundle of time. Do they have "Three's Company"? Not to worry-- I'll check.

Thanks very much,


Kevin