Ted Hong - CO2

On May 22nd, I sat down at Ryan Flemmings's Speech class, Group 3B. A class size about 15 people.

Opened class with a warm greeting, "Happy Tuesday everyone." It apparently was also a presentation day, or rather a continuation. Before calling out for attendance, he formally introduced me to the class and reassured students that I was not there to BRING DOWN THE RAIN OF JUDGMENT upon their presentations, but rather of him in a general class observation. He did a quick run down of attendance, as he was booting up the computer and projector.

Following that, he went to a sequenced list of the class in regards to who had not presented yet. He asked if there were any volunteers who preferred to present today, thus putting them first. He even rearranged the list to accommodate to other students, breeding that comfortability for them. He went over the list of people to present today and gave the floor to one of his students.

Ryan sat down next to me and showed me his rubric in evaluating students' presentations and performance. He separated points: grammar/pronunciation, topic development and organization, delivery, and connection with audience. In these, he took extensive notes and had set ways to identify pros and cons of one's performance (putting slashes to indicate grammar or quotations to indicate pronunciation). He said it would take about half a week to a week to be able to hand out evaluations back to students as he had to quantify their values as well as suggesting feedback. He had also constructed a way to be more efficient in grading for himself by separating certain items of major difficulty but integral to the students' grade. Brilliant.

The students were to perform 3 interesting items to the presenter for 5 minutes. In that class, only 3 were able to perform due to the overlap on time in performances and in-between with preparing their topics. There were some difficulties in between presentations as students took some time to boot up their powerpoints via email. In the meantime, Ryan asked the class if their presentations were on their flash drives or on their email. A resounding "on email" came about.

Ryan also kept a digital recording of each student's performance. However, the recorder ran out of batteries and was therefore forced to pause class while he sought out replacement batteries. He had a student "watch over" class but it wasn't really necessary as the class appeared very civil, silently talking amongst themselves.

After class, Ryan and I spoke a few words. He gave me his background on taking the role of the teacher and that he's been doing so for 5 years thus far. He suggested that I have a look see at an advanced class to get an idea of the range of levels. Although I did sign up for a higher level class to observe next, I realize I should have signed up for foundations as my weakness lies there. I'll have to arrange that.

Good class, good man.