Lucy CO-1

Ah Young Kim. Group 3B Listening.

So, is it possible to just tell your students absolutely no phones? Or, ask them to put them on a table upon entering class?

.....This was a class of 7 boys and 2 girls. The teacher put on a video and then didn't really do much class monitoring. She sat at her computer and looked to be writing something. She asked the students to take notes and afterwards asked them questions. The same group of students answered the questions over and over...Everyone including the teacher seemed bored.

So then lyrics to a song are put on the overhead. "I Am A Rock (I Am An Island...)" by Simon and Garfunkel. Some words are blanked out and the idea is that students should be able to fill in the blanks by context clues and 'rhyme'. I love where this is going! The teacher plays the song, lowering the volume where the missing words are, and then asks the students if they can try to fill in the blanks. 

Silence.

There is a major problem I see immediately. Line 2 of the song... 

"/In a deep and dark December;/"

"deep" and "dark" are blanks for the students to fill in. So it really reads... "/In a ________and _______December;/"

She asks the students if they can say how the singer is feeling. Yes, they can. This doesn't get them any closer to guessing "deep" and "dark" though. 

...Now this might be a great song for studying metaphor...or in this example, alliteration, with the repetition of the "d" sound in "deep" and "dark" and "December". This is even a great song for studying rhyme, as many lines DO use it. 

But do not tell your class that "deep" and "dark" rhyme...They don't.

After not much time at all, a boy gets out his phone and looks up the song. Then another boy. The first boy gets his phone taken away because he admits to using it, the second boy doesn't admit, keeps the phone, and keeps mysteriously knowing the answers. Ms. Kim is getting frustrated but she continues to stay seated at her desk. She is confused by how the students know the answers, but will not walk around?  I think about telling her, but decide against it. I am a passive observer. 

Some students do seem to honestly fill in some of the blanks- "cried" and "died". But those were ground balls. Kim is pretty visibly shaken with the obvious cheating going on but stays in her seat. ..Alright, Kim- you got it.

She defines "gaze" to one student by saying it means "to see with emotion"...This gets on my nerves. I have gazed at a peanut before. And not with any emotion. I'd say it means to look at something for a while with particular intensity. No emotion necessary. 

I do start to give the hairy eyeball to the boy still cheating. I'm pretty sure the girl next to me is just texting, not cheating-she doesn't seem to care much what's going on. The boy puts his phone away and suddenly no one knows any of the answers. Big surprise. Ms. Kim now can't decide if she's more satisfied with them not knowing answers, or liked it better before when they were at least talking (ie. saying answers they surely could not have known....But does she realize that surely they could not have known these answers because these words *don't rhyme*? ... I just don't know what she knows.) Anyway,we go on in silence for what seems like forever. Finally we reach the end of the song.

"And a rock feels no ____(pain)" "And an island never _____(cries)" ...These don't rhyme. With anything, much the less each other. Please stop teaching that they do. They do not.  Yes, they do help to show the theme but how could the students have guessed these random words?

Ms. Kim frankly is also bugging me because she is lapsing in her English. "I already made a lot of blank stare."...What does this mean? I think it means that you're already seeing a lot of blank stares. I wonder why. 

Finally the class is dismissed, and Ms. Kim comes over and chews me out because I came and observed the wrong class. I feel like telling her "Whew..."

Instead I just apologize profusely and think to myself: Well, at least there's that.