Me and Sara have had a great time over the last couple of days watching Friends Season 6 on a DVD we got from our friend, Safaneh and we already regret the fact that we rushed to watch all the episodes and have no more new ones! :( But well, who cares, the real friends are out there! :) Hamed, my private student and really cool friend, was so sad today because he missed our friend Ehsan who left for Canada only this morning. He could NOT concentrate on the lesson and seemed to be wondering the whole time which country Ehsan was flying over! In the end, he figured it must be Cyprus! Safaneh seems to be missing her uncle who also left for canada two days ago. Her latest blog entry was like the saddest I've ever seen! I guess people are leaving to start the fall semester there. Good luck guys! ;)
I have figured a new way of giving assignments in my general English classes. What I would do before was to ask my students to do the exercises in their workbooks plus perhaps a few chapters from a story book. Later, I learned it would be very effective if I also assigned them to give a short talk which would require them to use the new grammar point or the new vocabulary. Lately however, I've come up with a whole new idea. Instead of telling them to prepare for a "talk", I tell them to prepare for possible question and answers. Here's an example. Suppose I'm teaching my students Greetings and Introductions. This would be their homework: "I will ask you next session about you and your friends' names, ages, jobs, etc. You have learned how to answer those questions. You should be FULLY PREPARED to answer whatever question comes up. I want you to be TOTALLY FLUENT at this. You can prepare yourselves by making sentences in your heads, creating possible questions and then answering them, or practicing questions and answers with a friend." By doing so, I am giving them the responsibility of reviewing and practicing in their own time and in their own way. So, next time I'm working on the past tense, I'm not going to ask them to give a "talk" explaining what they did last weekend (which would be too limited and therefore quite easy), but I would ask them to prepare for all sort of questions ranging from their immediate past to early childhood to past events in history. Please post your comments on this idea and/or take this poll. Thanks! :)