Thank Goodness It’s Wednesday

It is the end of a week that I thought would never end. I cannot begin to say how grateful I am. At work, it has been an excruciatingly intense week. Though I wouldn’t mind if this were because of teaching, it has been because of silly little conflicts over silly little things that get conflated into seething discontent of gargantuan proportions. The causes come down to the fact that our department is not really professionalized, leaving a plethora of grey areas that are nobody’s actual responsibility, but become everyone’s problem. Especially mine, since word somehow got out that I am a fastidious administrator. But while I can administrate inanimate objects fastidiously, human beings- especially in the TESOL industry- are not rectangular objects and refuse to be filed neatly away in allocated folders. Not that I would want to, but since many of my non-teaching duties require the cooperation of this motley crew of rugged individuals, this week my sleep has been disturbed and my waking hours have seemed a nightmare.

Against this bleak backdrop, teaching has, fortunately, been a highlight. The second session of my Language Through Arts course went down extremely well, with a good chunk of time dedicated to an art-based information-gap activity I call “Detectives”. As I tell the student, the principles can be modified and the rules as loose or tight as needed for a particular group, giving the activity a variety of potential uses. One student is the detective and draws a “Wanted” poster on the board without having seen the suspect. The other students are witnesses, and have to describe the suspect from a picture only they can see. The activity can be used to review descriptive words, body parts or sentence patterns, and went down a storm in all three groups. I have seldom had such universal participation, focused target language use and laughter in a senior class… and after the activity they were also very attentive and involved in the theory aspect of the lesson.

As for my Foundation Year Writing students, I interspersed today’s lesson with a fun little personality/ learning style quiz, and demonstrated the value of the “funnel” introduction by asking some of the students to pour a bowl of lentils into a bottle. Using something kinesthetic and fun and different made the ideas more tangible for everyone, especially the reluctant writers. As for the more advanced students, we discussed how they could find some more challenging material in the supplementary book while others were still working on an activity. I did have a sense that this lesson cast the learning net a little wider than my writing classes last semester, when my teaching load limited my preparation time. Time is not the only ingredient of good lesson preparation, but it certainly helps.

Feeling good about today’s classes helped to boost me out of the blue funk and fatigue of the office politics. But the discontent has egged me on to start looking at greener pastures where my contribution would have more meaning. There is a reason why they call it “divine” discontent.