A couple weeks back I visited Candi Jiwa and Candi Blandongan with some teachers.
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| some kids |
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| whimsical wheelbarrow |
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| our lunch |
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| yes, the temple is in the middle of a rice field. |
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| Excavation site at Candi Bladongon was straight out of The Mummy Returns. Bu Euis is on the left. Bu Dila and Pak Helmi, the Tajemalela instructor, also joined us. |
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| The museum. |
We get these pretty random topics from the curriculum, like "expressions of pain and sympathy" or describing famous places, which sound vaguely useful I suppose but not to students who are at a very begginer level with English. My point about learning how to teach English the hard way is that I'm discovering how hard it actually is to describe things simply. For instance, I was at school for several hours after English club the other day trying to compile a list of vocabulary to describe famous buildings, which is the topic this week for my class with Bu Euis. So step 1 was to learn for myself what the different parts of the Eiffel tower are called and how in the world does one even begin to describe the roofs of the Sydney Opera House (we were trying to pick buildings they would recognize.) Several hours later I felt a lot more educated about the history and purposes of various architectural structures in these buildngs but thought to myself as I was walking home, "well that's all pretty useless for them." Are we really going to teach these kids that the shape of the Indonesian National Monument is called an obelisk and that the four supports of the Eiffel tower are called "pylons"? I'm still struggling with the questions of what the line is between useful information, neat, interest-sparking information and why did you just spend the last hour struggling to explain this to us information and where do I come off deciding what's useful for them or not? When I ask them why they want to learn English their reasons are mostly social-related - they want to understand Western media or they hope to be able to speak English when they meet some bules or maybe maybe go to some English-speaking country some day.
That aside, I've been thinking lately about how to deal with the problem of "Mr. Google" in the classroom. I just had a discussion with Bu Euis about the "growth mindset" and the importance of praising people's struggle to understand something rather than their talent or abilty to understand it. These thoughts were sparked by this article: https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/95208400815/the-learning-myth-why-ill-never-tell-my-son-hes (Did I mention her English is almost fluent so we can talk about stuff like this?) She said, "so you don't think we should just give them the vocabulary - they have to find it on their own?" And I said, "no, we should give them the vocabulary but we should praise their efforts when they try to make their own sentences without their phones." She was on board with this and said maybe next class we can first review some examples that build on our lesson from last week on describing one's house.
I'm also thinking about this problem in the context of using technology in the classroom, which we are sincerely trying to do. We've started this week with making powerpoints for English Club. The projector didn't work but we still showed them the powerpoints I made on Saying Hello Around the World and Weddings In Different Countries (for our monthly Cultural Exchange meeting - I didn't just want it to be an exchange between American and Indonesian cultures.) That seemed to go over well and hopefully we can work up to doing online research together or using videos/other media some day...
On a completely separate train of thought:
I have been writing down new vocab in a little purple book Paul's mom gave to me so as to pull out of my language dip. These are the words I have written down so far:
- lamon: day-dream
- bimbel: extra-curricular
- bidadari: fairy
- unyu-unyu: cute (as in Hello Kitty cute)
My life is turning into an Apples to Apples game.
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