TA#3 -- Listening -- Stephanie

On Tuesday, Victoria started off with passing out a short quiz on vacubulary.  Once these were all completeted and turned in, she announces that we will be learning about baseball idioms and terms today.  She asks random students what 'idiom' means, then she uses "raining cats and dogs" to describe the dual meaning of idioms--the literal and the metaphysical meaning.  To illustrate the literal meaning, she draws cats and dogs and raindrops falling from the sky.  She then describes the idiom's other meaning--to rain heavily.

From here, we move to a worksheet designed about a 'Words and Their Stories' passage from VOA Special English about baseball idioms.  We spend several minutes discussing how baseball is played (complete with a diagram on the board) and they we discuss how some baseball terms have morphed into common English idioms. Once they understand all of this, Victoria passes out a transcript of the passage that we will hear.  She explains that the students are to fill in the blanks with the idioms that they hear.  She plays the passage completely through once so they can just hear it and get a feel for it.  Then she plays it a piece at a time, then once more completely.  Finally, she writes the numbers 1-20 on the board and calls on students to tell her the answers.  (She explains it's important to write this part on the board so they can SEE the answers --they are only level 2-- and then make any needed corrections on their sheets.)  Once all answers have been given, she circles the answers that she will be giving a quiz on later in the week.

Wednesday was my day to teach class.  Previously, Victoria had given me some pre-listening activities that she wanted me to teach in class, namely the vocabulary and 3 activities based said vocabulary that were designed to get them thinking about Distracted Driving, the focus of the listening passage that we would be hearing the following day. 

I was excited and a little bit apprehensive about teaching, but as soon as I started, I found I really enjoyed it.  I liked interacting with the students. Most of the class seemed to pass in a blur, but I had a great deal of fun and I even got them laughing at times.  I wasn't too worried about what would happen if things got bad--Victoria has already said she'd jump in to help if I asked or things were to get ugly.  Luckily, she was able to stay in the corner and take notes and I breezed thru everything until class was almost over.  Everything seemed to happen so fast.  I felt I did a really good job explaining some of the directions and getting them active and working together, but I complelety forgot to do the modeling on the white board that I planned to do. 

Later in the week I had my meeting with Victoria and Ramin about the class and both seemed to echo my thoughts.  I had lots of confidence and I seemed really relaxed, but I forgot to do a critical part of teaching--the modeling.  Otherwise, it was a great first class and at least this time, I got a video where you can actually see me AND the students--unlike my TEFL I video where it looks like I'm teaching to Air.