Sometimes I come up with a "filler" lesson plan that's so successful that I end up applying across most of my classes. Recently, because of the end of the test-prep period, I had some mixed ability middle-school classes that weren't part of my regular curriculum. In these contexts, I get asked to put together a one-up lesson plan for a "speaking class." "Just teach them some speaking," my boss says.
In earlier times I would get stressed about these one-up classes, but no longer. I view them as a laboratory and as a chance to try things out. I have a little folder of ideas that I can pull something out of.
One idea I had was to do some "absurd" debates. I've done these before, but always very detailed and well-developed over several classes, in the style of my regular debate curriculum. This idea was a little different: get the ideas out there, brainstorm for maybe 15 minutes, and put the kids to debating right away.
This idea only works if you've already got most of the students (if not all) fully familiar with the basic debate format. Now that I've been doing this a while, I could be confident of this – most of the students, if they've had "Jared teacher" before, have done debate at some style or level.
With this prerequisite out of the way, this "absurd" debate lesson was wildly successful. I never saw so many normally bored or disengaged or struggling students begin to laugh at the propositions and giggle at the prospect of defending one side or the other of these strange propostions. A few students took a while to "get" the exercise, but once they did, they too were fully on board.
Here is a list of the absurd debate propositions I came up with.
"Santa Claus is a criminal."
"Black is the best color."
"Aliens make the best friends."
"Unicorns are better than zebras."
"A smartphone is smarter than a dog."
"The moon is made of green cheese."
"The earth is flat."
"The teacher is a ghost."
"This debate is boring."
I've done a few of these before, and may have mentioned them, but never all together like this. I need to come up with more – this has been one of the most successful speaking debate classes I've ever done. I never have had so many students muttering to themselves phrases such as, "재미있구나" [jaemiittguna = this is interesting]. It's very gratifying to hear this, as a teacher.