Happy New Year!

What are you saying goodbye to?

What are you saying hello to?

Only a Birder Would Stand There Like That

Long underwear.

I came back to the apartment to put on longjohns under my jeans, and to grab my aviator-style winter hat–the one with ear flaps that clasp under my chin. Feeling better prepared for the icy winds off the lake, I went back to the marina with my binoculars and spotting scope.

Every year between late December and late February we get a lot of interesting waterfowl on the waters between Peche Island and the marinas on the Windsor side.

I’m not very good at identifying all the little divers, but I managed to make out Mute Swan, Red-breasted Merganser, Common Merganser, Hooded Merganser, Bufflehead, Canvasback, Mallard, Greater (?) Scaup. While I was peering at the water in front of the rocky shore of Peche Island, a little red fox with a white-tipped tail came out of the woods to take a drink. He walked nimbly across the rocks on little black-stocking feet.

Ring-billed Gulls filled the air on the east side of Lakeview Park Marina, while a few Bonaparte’s preferred the quiet water on the west side. Last week I spied a lone Herring Gull walking around the parking lot trying to swallow an old dried piece of fish-jerky he found on the ground.

My morning visit to the marina was an attempt to shake of the sluggishness that has weighted me down ever since Christmas. I think the lethargy is from all the carbohydrates I’ve been eating.

Each morning I’ve been lazing in bed for too long with my Sudoku puzzle book. Normally I have a cup of tea and wait for a surge of energy before doing anything. This time I decided to do something in hopes it would give me energy. It did.

What Santa Brought Me

I made out pretty well considering I barely celebrate Christmas!

From my brother I got this witty e-card.

One of the students gave me a traditional Karen woven cross-body bags.

Sylvain and I had agreed to exchange one gift each as a compromise. He got me two ceramic frying pans. Since I refuse to use Teflon and couldn’t afford ceramic when I first furnished my kitchen, poor Sylvain has been putting up with broken yolks on his over-easy eggs on Saturday mornings. No more!

Although his breaking the “one gift” rule didn’t surprise me, the Kobo Touch e-reader did. It’s so CUTE! I like the fact that the pages look like real pages with real ink, though for that you sacrifice being able to read in the dark. That’s okay. I love the way I can turn the page by swiping my finger in the same place and direction as I would to turn a page in a real book.

For dinner we were invited to his sister’s house, and she is the most amazing cook, so that was a fantastic treat in itself. (I’m not just saying that because she reads my blog, either.)

Equally exciting was what Sylvain did for me today. He drove me and his sister out to Kingsville to see a Great Grey Owl that had been reported there this week. This boreal species is rarely seen around here, but this seems to be an invasion year…certainly it is for the Snowy Owl.  I knew I might never get another chance in my lifetime to add this species to my life list, and I was becoming whinier with each passing day that we did not set out to try to view it (due to the busy-ness of the holiday).

We found the crowd of photographers and birders easily. What a handsome owl!

Great Grey Owl - Kingsville, ON - December 2011

Once Sylvain and his sister had taken enough photographs of this bird that the Peterson’s guide describes as “very tame,” we set off to try to see Snowy Owls in or around the farmers fields near Point Pelee National Park.

From the narrow dirt roads we did manage to see the white lumps among the dead stalks and remnants from this year’s harvest, but even with the scope we could barely make out the faces of the two snowies.  We have read and agreed to abide by the birder’s code of ethics, which prohibits, among other things: littering, trespassing or harassing stressed birds. And so we did not tramp across the farmer’s land to get a closer look–as some photographers chose to do.

After a washroom stop at the park, Sylvain decided to make one more loop around the fields that had the snowies. A woman approached with a small girl in the car. Had we seen an owl? We pointed out the two white blurs in the distance, one to our left and one to our right. Her shoulders drooped with disappointment.  We drove on up the road to head home. Suddenly Sylvain asked, “What’s that up there?”  He was pointing to the television antenna on the roof of the house we were passing.

“Is it real?” his sister asked.

“It has to be real, it’s moving!”

We jumped out of the car before it was even brought to a halt and turned our binoculars on the gorgeous white owl perched on the wire, haloed by sunshine and blue sky.  I waved to the vehicles back at the fields and soon the mom was pointing out the Snowy Owl to her small daughter. This was actually the most heavily barred of the three Snowy Owls we saw today. The others appeared whiter, at least from a distance.

Snowy Owl - Onion Fields - December 2011

What a great Boxing Day gift!

Word Salad

December marked the end of a term, which means I was busy assessing my students’ levels in all four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. It was quite an undertaking considering that mine is the only multi-level class spanning all the levels. Most classes are limited to a single level, though two of them span two levels and the advanced class lumps the 5, 6 and 7s together in one room.

So I spent an entire weekend creating rubrics for all four skills for seven levels. It nearly killed me. Other teachers are fortunate because in a class full of level four students, it’s easy to spot the slower ones who need to repeat, the ones who are almost ready for the next teacher, and the ones who finish all the assignments early and are bored.  Some of those teachers do not even bother to test (though they are supposed to). Or they use the portfolio method, which I must look into immediately, as it will probably  save me a lot of grief.

In any case, when my results came back, one thing was glaringly clear. In my particular class (though this would not hold true for a class full of Chinese or Russians, as they are usually very strong writers of ESL), listening is the skill that is most likely to be higher than the other three skills. This is followed closely by speaking skills.  Everyone in my class has poorer reading ability than their listening and speaking. But writing? It’s at the very bottom all around. Nobody in my class can write well.

The compositions they wrote for their tests are what I heard one teacher at a recent conference call “word salad.”

Here is a charming example (note that many of them also misunderstood the instructions. Instead of picking ONE of three topic choices, they thought they were supposed to cram all three topics into one composition. The three topics of choice were: 1. the story behind a scar; 2. an emergency involving medical care; 3. the Canadian health care system compared to the one in your first country.

My escar

Was I wark ing it is my fumar/when I cuting. Tree it was tree felt on my leg. injred. aftathat  it bleeding a lot out my leg. becuuse not houseptall my vellge. is to far To town. but I sating HOMe. My self. becaus I cant walking. My conslusion is Canada besste country to my country.

Now comes the question: how can I help them?

I have already told them that in 2012 we are going to focus a lot more on writing since it is their weakest skill.  I just have to figure out how to be effective in this new campaign to turn them into writers.

First off, I can see very clearly that we need to return to the sentence level. Also, I want to start a practice of using a SIMPLE set of proofreading marks so they can correct their own errors. We need to start a habit of checking and revising our writing so that no paragraph is done until we have completed three drafts. I probably won’t torture them with more than that unless I can make the process exciting and fun, which I might be able to do.

For example, maybe I could encourage each student to put in one interesting detail. for the student above who said he was farming one day back in his country when a stick hit him in the leg: what crop was he about to sow? For the student who wrote of falling out of a tree as a boy: what kind of tree was it?

I haven’t found a text book yet that is geared to their level (and at the same time aimed at adults), but one website suggests guiding the compositions with questions. When did it happen? Where were you? What was the weather like that day? What season was it?  I wish I could remember how I learned to write. What tricks did my teachers use?

I think what I’ll do first is hand back these compositions because they have a huge amount of potential to be great stories. I’ll review what makes a solid sentence (subject + transitive verb + object OR subject + BE + subject complement, and so on), give them strips of paper and ask them to pull out as many simple sentences as they can find. We will work each of those sentences: Does it start with a capital letter? Did you put a period at the end? Is the verb in the correct tense? Is there subject-verb agreement?

When they have doctored up their sentences, we can add a few more good ones. I say this because their speaking tests were around the same thing: the story behind a scar. Their verbal reports were detailed, funny and well-structured. The written versions were a mere shadow of that. Where did all the detail go when the medium was the written word? Let’s put it back.

Once we have all the sentences down, we’ll arrange them into beginning, middle, end. We’ll then add a topic sentence, concluding sentence and a title.

I wonder if this will work. Please let me know if you have any ideas.

Makes It All Worth While

my dear teachar kelly  i wish you happholiday/season thankyou my best teachar for having A good heart thankyou very much for teashing me fourm your student ali

Update – Eggnog, Snowflakes and Sudoku

There is a carton of eggnog in my refrigerator.

This year I vow not to forget to stock the apartment with enough staples to last me until the stores re-open.

My classroom door won third place in the decorating contest. I can’t share a picture because I printed up life-sized photos of my students’ faces and taped them in the window of the door so that they seemed to be peering out. They were wearing elf hats, some of them.  I covered the rest of the door in blue paper and on top of that taped my famous snowflakes.  These snowflakes are much prettier, I think, than the ones I used to make before I learned how to make six-pointed flakes. The old four-pointed ones looked more like valentines. Oh, I also made a speech bubble saying “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” using a delicate font.

At the end of the week we have a big lesson about the more secular of the Canadian Christmas traditions. All classes will come together in one big room for that. Each class has to teach one part of the lesson. My class is going to explain what elves are. Well, it will be a short skit by two students that goes something like this:

H: Hey, W, why are you wearing that funny hat?

W: I’m an elf!

H: What’s an elf?

W: We are Santa’s little helpers. We live with him at the North Pole and help him make all the toys. We wear green suits with pointy shoes and we have pointy ears, too!

H: I don’t understand.

W: Well, why don’t I just show you. Would you like to see a video of some elves?

H: Oh, yes, I would!

W: Okay then…

At that point we will show the ElfYourself video that we made in computer lab using students’ faces. It’s a pretty funny video since some of my students use canes or scooters, but in the video they are break dancing.  I think it will get everyone in a cheery mood.  If you have never made a video using ElfYourself, I highly recommend it. It’s free and you can send the link to friends and relatives to watch (before it expires on January 15). It costs $5 if you want to download your video to keep for posterity.

The other thing I’ve been busy with is addictively doing one Absolutely Nasty Sudoku Level 3 puzzle after the other. Although I am a big fan of SudokuSlam for allowing me to turn cells different colours,  I turn to SudokuSolver by Andrew Stuart when I am stuck. Unlike SudokuSlam, it doesn’t stop giving tips at the diabolical level.  I can load any puzzle into his software. Then, with his “take step” feature, I can pinpoint the exact juncture in the flow of logic where I failed to recognize a strategy that I could have employed. I then study up on that strategy so I recognize when to use it next time. So far I am great with hidden singles, naked pairs/triples/quadruples, hidden pairs and triples, pointing pairs, box-line reduction, x-wing, swordfish, Gordonian rectangles and y-wing. I am just now learning how to do xy-chains and haven’t yet figured out Gordonian polygons.

What are YOU doing these days?

P.S. I had an odd dream the other night of a Hanukkah advent calendar. Actually it was a cross between a menorah and an advent calendar.

Peanuts in My Pocket

The mornings are mild for December. I have to be careful as I take the shortcut, though, not to slip on the frosty grass.

One squirrel has figured it out. I’ve been dropping one peanut in the same two spots every morning and afternoon five days per week since August–one by the dumpster and one under the mulberry tree.  One squirrel now waits for me in the mulberry tree. “Hey buddy!” I say, and she or he comes bounding toward me expectantly. I call all squirrels “buddy.”

Two days ago all the squirrels in the area were sitting up high chattering angrily and wouldn’t come down. As I crossed through the alley by the dumpster, I spotted the reason for their agitation: a tabby with its big tomcat head and twitchy tail.

This morning my buddy with the red tufts on his ears wasn’t in the mulberry tree nor by the dumpster; the cat was there instead.

The sparrows are envious. The peanuts are too big for them, though they fly down to investigate each time I toss one out. I don’t always have time to stop, shell a peanut and break it into wee sparrow-beak-sized bits.

Perhaps I will buy some birdseed for the other pocket.