I must confess, my "Advanced" English class is a bit of a farce. I am beyond certain that they are there because they have no choice, especially because at least 6 of the 13 girls I teach for two hours every two weeks haven't the faintest idea what I'm saying when I speak.
It doesn't help that I have NO CLUE what to do with these girls. As much as I appreciate my posh position in my Middle School, I must admit I have been thrown into a school system mid-semester without any plan or advice about how to proceed. All I have been told to do is get these girls to speak English when I'm with them... easier said than done.
In this, my fantastically equipped English lab has come to be a bane to any effective form of communication. I swear keeping these kids' attention is like herding a crap-load of kittens on a caffeine high! My lab is equipped with a plethora of computers, most of which emerge from the students' desks. Sadly the interactive white board that the lab also possesses does not work, and without a projector, I am deprived of one of the only teaching tools I was actually taught how to use! (said tool is MS PowerPoint by the way)
So, and "Advanced" class that can't use slide shows, videos, or visuals of any kind. Plus, most of them have little to listening ability. At least 3 look at me blankly when I ask them to say a single word.
And again, giving Middle School girls computers is a TERRIBLE idea if you want them to listen to you at all. Leave them to themselves, they flop down on their desks and idly click away or they play games, almost oblivious to the world around them. It takes them about a minute and a half to find the working computers once entering a room. It's remarkable really, I unplugged most of the computers in the room and it still took them no time to find the working computers! They even got wise that a few were unplugged and got them working again.... I feel the only way to get them offline is to collect all of the ethernet cables from around the room and hide them. I'd say this is a ridiculous situation, but to be perfectly frank I wasn't too different as a Middle Schooler. I mean I plowed through all my work to find time for myself and what I wanted to do rather than invest myself in the classroom experience. I honestly can't blame these girls for writing me off, especially when they don't understand me.
Anyway, this post is not about the work ethic of my 'Advanced' students, this is a story that caught me off guard. Today's task was to "make a movie pitch." The goal was to get them to come up with a story for a movie, providing details about characters, places, etc. After 20 minutes I was able to express that story = scenario and that characters were people. 8 minutes later they return to say they don't understand. So I broke down and told them to write down details in Korean first, then translate in English. I allowed them to look up words with Google (not that I was fooled for one second that's what they were using the computer for, but we were all that age once).
So after another 30 minutes I went around and looked at what my students had come up with. One had thought of a fairly serious story of an aspiring young singer, poor, who rises up to compete with other musical students. She does well, but is in competition with another singer in her class. In the end she tragically dies after a slew of "harsh comments." Since it was a story I rolled with it, told them good work and moved on.
My other group of girls had a story about an egg. An egg that dreams that it rides a spaceship to the moon where it meets and alien. The egg goes "Ahh!" waking itself up from the dream, and the egg's mother asks her why she screamed. End story.
Needless to say, I laughed with them, smiled and moved to my last group.
Perhaps my most stubborn group, this last group of four girls had scribbled some words on the worksheet and explained in broken English their story.
"Girl is addicted to computer games" they said.
"Ok, that's a story...." I moved on the list and saw their characters had no names, the location of their story was SCHOOL, the time NOW. I blinked and looked at the mishmash of English and Hanguel letters on bottom of the page where I asked "What is the ending of the story? Is there a surprise?"
This is what I get for offering a 'creative' assignment:
Their response read something like, "girl kills mother, she transgender and had both father mother was other girl's dad so she gets slapped."
I blinked a few times at reading that and looked suspiciously at their computer, set to Google translate.
"Uhhhh," I said, searching for words. "I'm not sure if that's what you meant to say."
The four girls look at me for a moment before emphatically gesturing to the computer. The next 8 minutes were spent typing and retyping their story's surprise ending, trying to understand what they were getting at....
Needless to say we didn't get very far, I had a hard time deciding how to approach the transgender part of their surprise ending. Not because it was an unusual choice in plot twists, but I wasn't sure how to have them understand the difference between gender and sex. (Yes, I confess. Making that distinction was more important to me than actually getting them to use English correctly). Needless to say they still don't know, and I still am not sure how to explain to a 15 year old Korean girl what transgender actually means. I sincerely hope I don't have to, but I have become a bit wiser about setting a bunch of Middle School kids loose on the internet, even if it is only to translate words into English....
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