Yesterday, as is more and more the case, I turned on my camera in each of my classes. The video camera has become a kind of reliable pedagogical tool, which I use partly because there is pressure from Curt to provide fodder for his efforts to effectively advertise our hagwon, and which I will happily support, but also because I have found that my students, as much as they groan and complain about the camera, actually respond to it very positively, speaking with more focus, with more effort, and more entertainingly, too.
Below is a sampling of yesterday's video caps. Mostly, these days, I don't post my recordings to youtube – I'm a bit lazy (it took me 2 hours to minimally reformat, edit and upload these) and they weren't being used or viewed much. I will let Curt look through the raw clips if he wants, and a few times he's taken some things or asked me to compile some things. I still think that if I was willing put in the effort, it would be cool to have a daily "video diary" of my classroom work.
So here is a one day's video diary of student work in speaking classes at various levels.
At the start of the day, yesterday, I was coaching two students (siblings) with special prepartion for speeches they want to submit to a contest. I think the older brother's speech was a bit boring (and he was stubborn about applying my advice to make it more interesting). I think the younger sister has a good chance of some kind of prize – she's remarkable for someone who has never lived or studied abroad.
Next, we practiced a little song in my Phonics class – these are near-beginners. Then, we practiced the anachronistically Christmas-themed roleplay (an adaptation of the story of Scrooge) in my slightly more advanced Sirius class (where I had to play several roles myself, including Mr Scrooge, because of absent students) – these kids voices are very hard to hear and the sound quality is terrible, I know.
Then, for two classes, we did TOEFL-style speaking – supposedly one-minute speeches. The middle-school students are a rather unmotivated group, none of whom really got close to a high-quality speech, but these were just practice speeches – their speech tests (on exact same topic) will be on Friday. The elementary students (the two girls in the second), on the other hand, are supposedly the top of the hagwon (certainly academically they are), although I think I have others who are better at speaking, specifically.
Finally, in my awesome new TOEFL1 middle school (really these are transitional kids, 6th-moving-to-7th, just now) we practiced longer, only lightly-prepared (and with zero notes) summaries of the Reading-vs-Listening variety known as TOEFL Speaking "Task 4" questions.
I suppose I decided to post these partly to give some picture of what it is I spend my day doing. I'm not just sitting around complaining.