A Hit

Have the courage to follow through.  I’d forgotten that little mantra that got me through my first months of teaching.

This week I covered for a colleague who is off sick as well as teaching my own class three mornings this week. The one I’m covering is a tough crowd, hard to please. They are very advanced, so I find it difficult to come up with lessons that are both edifying and intriguing to them.

I wanted to fulfill a request from a student in that class to do something concretely related to using English in everyday life, such as to visit the doctor.

Monday was computer lab day.

On Tuesday I facilitated an activity called “What Would You Say?” I gave the A partners cue cards with situations such as being short-changed by the cashier when shopping, finding half of an insect in your dish in a restaurant, or arriving home to discover you’ve just bought a pair of shoes that is mis-matched in size.  To spice it up and force the As to have to be more persuasive and assertive, I instructed the B partners not to give in too easily.  That lesson went well.

Yesterday, for police and emergencies month, I used a lesson plan that the Toronto Police uses in their newcomer outreach program. First we watched a clip from the 2004 movie Crash: the scene where Matt Dillon molests Thandie Newton during a traffic stop.

In small groups, they then discussed what happened in the scene, how they felt about it, and what they would do if it happened to them in their first countries. Interestingly, many said it could never happen in their first countries. In Iraq, for example, a female officer would always be called in to pat down a woman. One man said that if anyone, even a cop, dishonoured a woman that way, her whole family would hunt him down. Okay, then!

After reading about the police’s rights to search us, our vehicles or houses and the situations in which we have the right to refuse consent to search, the final exercise was a writing assignment in which we filled out an actual police misconduct complaint form that I downloaded from the OIPRD. The students wrote the reports from the point of view of the couple in the movie.  I took the essays home and marked them last night.  One student thanked me profusely for doing that: marking every single spelling and grammar error in his whole essay.

Last night I felt as if I’d shot my wad, if you’ll excuse the raunchy idiom. Looking at what I had prepared for today, it suddenly seemed lame and too babyish. So, in spite of knowing full well that I needed to go to bed and that my search for a new lesson plan idea would probably prove fruitless, I spent two hours on the wild goose chase.  Desperate, I said a little prayer to the Universe.

I finally decided to stick with the lame lesson plan and just try to deliver it well. It was a game whereby the students are divided into two groups–doctors and patients. I give them role playing cards so the patients know what ailments they have and the doctors know what to recommend for each ailment. The vocabulary was too low for this group, but… yeah. I decided to go with it anyway and cross my fingers that they didn’t roll their eyes.

Before the role play, I warmed them up by asking them to tell me all the vocabulary they could think of related to doctor visits. We started with “book an appointment” and it started rolling from there: requisition, prescription, x-ray, blood work, lab, ultrasound, MRI, CT scan, diagnosis, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, symptoms, fever, rash, headache, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, and so forth. Soon we had covered the entire board with words and had pulled up “leprosy” on Google translate.

By the time I passed out the role cards and arranged the chairs into doctor-patient pairs around the room, I was feeling more confident. Since there was an odd number of students, I took on one of the doctor roles.  As it ends up, all the most articulate students became doctors while the lower level ones became patients. That was perfect for scaffolding and gave the stronger ones a chance to stretch by pretending to be doctors.  Each patient was allowed five minutes with her doctor, then I would announce “change doctors!” and all the patients had to rotate clockwise to the next chair.

It was a hit! Usually this class starts to squirm at ten till the bell, but at five minutes before the hour I could not get them to stop and look up for the plenary discussion.

Prayer answered.

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