The picture at right are some cats I drew on the board for my Copernicus반 elementary students today.
We had a 회식 [hoesik = business lunch or dinner, sort of] today for lunch, before work. It was at that buffet-slash-steakhouse that Koreans love so much: VIPS. I call it Korean wedding food. It's OK, I guess.
I ate some cream of broccoli soup that was good. Really, texture-wise I'm handling most things OK, as long as I take small bites, chew carefully, and down it with lots of liquids. I had a few bites of salad which is very hard to eat but that I miss eating.
At work I allowed my TEPS-M반 middle schoolers to "buy" a pizza party with their collected "alligator dollars" – for 100 (which they pooled among themselves) I ordered them pizza, and we skipped the vocab test (which may have been the highlight, for them). I ate a slice of the pizza, even.
Curt had asked me earlier how it is I get those TEPS kids to talk so much. I suppose buying them pizza helps – but to put it in more methodological/theoretical terms, I'm finding intrinsic motivator for them to seek out communicative proficiencies. Or, um, something like that.
[daily log: walking, 3 km]
Isn’t pizza extrinsic?
Of course. Hmm… and giving “dollars” is extrinsic. But having a classroom “economy” where the date and cost of the pizza party is negotiated over a period of weeks feels intrinsic, to me. I have always felt somewhat sceptical of a black-white distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic. As a newly minted CELTAist, what is your take on it? When does extrinsic become instrinsic? Doing something because of the “joy of learning” is extrinsic too, since you have the pleasurable feeling of it motivating you.
I have always felt that the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic lay in whether or not the students had a sense of “agency” in the process. Do the students study directly for the reward or to ward of the punishment, or do they study because they have realized they need the material in question (in this case, English) to achieve some other objective (i.e. to negotiate a pizza party with the teacher).