downhill

It's hard to believe, but on Monday I'll be embarking on my final three weeks of teaching here at Smoo. It's all downhill from here. I've already administered the students' first quiz; the only thing left will be the midterm exam. In the meantime, I'll have my usual complement of journals to flip through and drench in red ink.

I know one thing I'd do differently if I had the time to formally institute the changes: I'd spend less time on error correction in those journals. In fact, I'd spend no time at all on correction; instead, I'd simply circle whatever errors I found, then let the students get together to figure out where/how they must have gone wrong. I'd then ask them to do rewrites, and only after that would I involve myself in actual correction. What I do now is, basically, provide a proofreading service for the students. They appreciate the feedback, but I don't think they're getting as much out of the experience as they could. I'd love to make that change this semester, but given how tightly I've scheduled the activities, that won't be possible.

Teaching is as much a growing process as learning is. You learn while you teach; you experiment with different methods, learn what works, then go with that. You also update your methods on occasion-- not necessarily by jumping onto the latest pedagogical fads (most of which are stupid, anyway), but by going with what makes sense to you and responding to the specific needs of the academic community you're in. Most teachers, for example, realize pretty quickly that, for all their claims to "know grammar," a high proportion of low- to intermediate-level Korean students still produce lengthy utterances or essays that are grammatically feeble. This means that many of us will sacrifice part of the vaunted communicative approach-- an approach that stresses merely being understood-- in order to go Old School and reintroduce the meat-and-potatoes elements of grammar, style, and usage. Clarity does actually count for something.

Don't drop those articles!
Don't add articles where they're not needed!
Watch those prepositions!
Watch the plural and third-person "S"!
Watch how you phrase ideas in the negative ("everyone don't know")!
Watch that subject-verb agreement!
Watch how you use "yes" and "no" in response to negative questions!
(etc.)

I'm sure the above sounds quite familiar to people in the business.

Ah, the business. And I'll be leaving it soon.

But I'll be back. Like Arnold and MacArthur and Jesus, I offer a promise (or is it a threat?) to return.

Today I'm making charoset (we're celebrating Passover early in my classes, you see), shopping for cheeses to make a cheese platter, doing laundry, proofing a short paper, and gearing up for the week. Luckily, I did my class prep on Friday, which is why I could afford to laze around this weekend. Today, though, I've got a few things to do. The charoset and cheese platter are for my Current Events English class; I had hoped to do something with them last week, but I was just too tired, for some reason.

This week we'll have the cheese party, and along with my coworker Terry and his students, we'll be doing a movie night on Thursday evening. Not a bad way to start the downhill slide.


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