David-co2

On May 24th I had the privilege to observe Ryan Flemmings listening class. I had just arrived from work and he was a couple minutes out from starting class.  He introduced me to the class and they all said hi in their various accents and we were underway.  I thought it kind of funny that he told the class not to be nervous that i was there.  I was not as he put it observing them but observing him.  I thought this interesting because I wondered to myself if my presence in the class actually did make the students apprehensive.  

We began with a various listening exercises where students were required to listen to either passages that they had questions on after or had to fill in the blanks.  It was nothing special but it was good listening practice. Next came something that was very interesting to me dictation.  Dictation is interesting to me because it is actually something that is very familiar to me working in a medical office where physicians and pa's are dictating constantly.  In fact as an I.T. guy in the medical field on of my primary jobs is find dictation jobs that get lost on the computer (which probably happens more often than you would think).  After our jobs are dictated they are transcribed by either medical software or the transcription department.  Anyways, Ryan had provided me with a copy of all the handouts so that I could actively see what the students were doing as we went through the exercises.  I was very grateful for the copies and decided that I would participate by not only paying attention to what Ryan was doing as he was teaching the class but by actually filling out the worksheets as well. 

Quick thought, on a side note the unfortunate thing for me in the class is that I was extremely tired.  The classroom was dark we were listening to English my beautiful mother tongue was being spoken and I just kept nodding off constantly.  Sometimes my schedule can be crazy and leave me feeling like a lump and that was what my body was determined to be during this class.  I really hope that Ryan did not notice me nodding off because I was really not trying to be rude and I had no desire at this point to offend anyone.  Knowing this was not good I did the only thing that I could that any other person who drives frequently during the night time does.  Slap and pinch myself to oblivion.  I am not sure how many times I actually slapped and or pinched myself but I can say that I walked out of that classroom with dozens of bruises and red marks on my skin.  With that out of the way back to the blog.

As I was saying I filled out the question and answer sheets just as the students did.  Now to the dictation part where I got distracted earlier in my writing.  I was surprise perhaps due to my weariness and perhaps just because how hard the art of dictation is how difficult it was to keep up.  Ryan played the piece several times and paused several times for us and I did eventually get all the words that were there, however I remember how difficult it was to listen to every single word.  Perhaps in English we as native speakers do not listen to every word very often because we are able to derive meaning from context and schema. 

After the dictation he just asked us to listen to a news program in class that dealt with life during the 70's and 80's in the United States and it was a nice way of throwing in a little cultural emersion.  All he wanted us to do was to take notes on what we heard.  Again I was surprised at the difficulty of the program and I had a hard time keep pace with all the different subjects that were covered in such a short amount of time.

I must say I enjoyed the opportunity to sit in on this class and it was an eye opening experience for how difficult it must be for the students of CIES to learn listening.