Happy Teachers Appreciation Day - 2014

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The big bosses

Happy Teachers Day! 


I had a great time yesterday at my school's lunch. I almost didn't want to go because this will be my last Teacher's Day lunch at ITESM. 

Proud Tec Teacher

I will miss being a Tec teacher. The lunch was a joy as always. I know quite a few of my coworkers, but because so many of them are part-time I rarely get to see them. That's what makes these lunches so much fun!

My award

I also had the added bonus of receiving an award for the two  international projects I started at ITESM this year: The Alphabet Book project and The Dram Flag Project. It is always great to be appreciated for the things that we do as teachers.

I hope that you had an amazing day as well, and that we all go on to experience greatness for the next year!

2014 ITESM Dream Flag Video

The Dream Flag Celebration is this weekend!

My students and I aren't able to join (the 2,000 miles is a bit much for us), but we were able to send a video which will be shared during the celebration. Check it out!



The director of the dream flag project, Jeff Harlan, was kind enough to send us a thank you "Got the video. Awesome! We'll show it Saturday. Please tell your students that we really appreciate their effort. More than 500 people will attend Saturday and be inspired by your dreams, your energy, and your great work."

To look at all the other Dream Flags created this year by ITESM students you can go to the dream flag gallery.

Post by Melted ELT Activities.

ITESMs Inaugural Dream Flags

This is for the Reach To Teach Teach Abroad Blog Carnival, a monthly carnival focusing on providing blogs to ESL teachers around the globe. If you'd like to contribute to next month's Blog Carnival, please contact Dean at dean@reachtoteachrecruiting.com, for more information and check out the other bloggers contributions here.

"What lesson or moment are you most proud of in the classroom?"

I don't know if I could pick one, but I can pick the most recent!

This semester I made it a priority to have my students do work which would NOT just stay in the classroom. One aspect of this was that we made dream flags!

We started the semester talking about hopes and dreams and kept that theme going throughout the short stories and assignments. 

When it got down to it we had a day or two of poetry where we made poetry videos discussing different types of poetry (Catalog, Diamante, Haiku, etc.)

 

Picking their favorite type of poem, students created their own poems about their dreams and put them on dream flags.

What are dream flags? Well, to the right is the description we posted along with our flags.

Basically, dream flags are an international art and poetry project inspired by Tibetan Prayer Flags and Langston Hughes' poetry. 

It is a chance for students to contemplate and reflect about different dreams that we have and embrace in the similarities.

Once a year in Philadelphia there is a Dream Flag ceremony where schools that are able to are invited to send their flags to be displayed along others made during this event.

How did we go about making the dream flags?

After the students wrote their poems, their teacher looked over them for spelling or grammar errors. I was sure to keep in mind that poetry, unlike an essay, doesn't have to follow traditional grammar rules. My students LOVED this as it gave them the chance to be more creative and really play with the language.

Then, each student got a piece of material (usually a cut up t-shirt) that was about the size of a piece of paper (8.5 by 10). It was a windy day so we taped it down to the table to be sure it didn't fly off.

Most students wrote their poems down in marker first, but some of them went straight to paint.

After the basic poem was written down many students went over the text in a different color, or with sparkles.

Then they used the markers, stamps, and paints to decorate the rest of their flag however they liked.

At the end we carefully took them to my office where we spread them out to dry.

While we were doing this some students from other English classes came by and had the chance to work on their own flag! The catch? They had to write and speak in English! My students could help them with their poems (and I would play the video we made), but we had to communicate in English.

In the end the students made unique flags to represent their unique dreams!

Some of them still had errors, but the meaning and hope still manages to show through!

 Once we finished, we strung them up on campus and let people see what they were.

We also uploaded them to the dream flags gallery where other schools involved in the project can see them

I am looking forward to doing this again with next semester's class. Plus, in the next semester we'll send this batch of flags (and the next semesters) to Philadelphia for the ceremony which is really exciting for my students.

For more information on the dream flag project (like how to join or its history you can check out http://dreamflags.org/

If you end up being part of the dream flag project please let me know, so I can take a look at your students' creations! You can comment here, tweet me at @eslcarissa or find me on facebook 

News Coverage: Task Based Learning with Tourism Projects

One of the biggest Task Based Projects in my Advanced One English class is a Tourism Project. They get in small groups and create a travel agency whose purpose is to sell you on their city. Each group is given  a different English speaking city and they work together to create a brochure, presentation and then sell the hell out of it!

This year we worked hard to make it something special. Students were given a table to make their own, and after school for two hours family, friends, teachers, fellow students and everyone I could tweet showed up waiting to be convinced which team should get their covetted vote.

Students worked hard (in English!) to get people to vote for them and it was a great success.
 
We even got some newspaper coverage: www.noroeste.com.mx/publicaciones.php?id=857285
(this link seems to be acting temperamental. You can also access it from the wayback machine)

For my non Spanish speaking readers here's the essential gist (not a direct translation, as I changed a few things for clarity):

Tour around the world

School students have an English Festival with a sample of countries and traditions

By: Gabriela Camacho
March 28th 2013

CULIACÁN. Coordinated by English teacher Carissa Peck, fourth semester high school students at ITESM were put into 27 groups of 3 or 4 members to present various English speaking cities.

Singapore, Perth, Dublin, Seattle, Durban and Bristol were among the cities represented by high school students who creatively and enthusiastically prepared their booths.

As guest judges evaluated the students, their foreign language teachers: John Harper, Ann Persaud, and Carlos Gonzalez graded them based on their innovation, information, fluency, explanations and overall presentation.

Not the most  in depth coverage, but it was great to see the level of enthusiasm rise as students realized they'd be "famous" in the newspaper.

Worth it

I just had one of those cliché experiences where it really felt like it was worth being a teacher.

I was walking back from my 3:00pm class (where 33% of the class didn't show up today), and ran into a student from last semester.

Student: Hey! How are you? How are your new students?
Me: Good, they aren't you guys though.
Student: No.
Me: Well...except for the ones that are you guys. (I have some of her classmates again in the next level of classes.)
Student: Well, I guess.
Me: Who's your new teacher?
Student: Teacher B, he's good; he's funny.
Me: Good.
Student: He's different from you though. He just assigns essays and expects us to do them. You broke everything down, so that we just had to assemble them.
Me: Well
Student: I mean your class was a lot of work. We always did a lot of work in your class, but I feel like I actually learned the most from you.
Me: Good
Student: And, so I went home and I did it...I just wrote...and I did well! He really liked my essay and I told him, "Yeah, that's because I had Carissa as my teacher"

:-)

Later I was planning a lesson on summarizing. Usually I have them all summarize the same text, but since they are each working on a city report now I went out and found each of them a relevant article about the city they are working on to summarize. This way the summary may actually be useful to them and not just busy work. I stayed late after school finishing finding articles and I commented to a friend, "I don't know why I am doing this none of them are going to appreicate it."

The next day as I passed out the assignment one student looked up and said, "Teahcer you did research for us? Thank you that was so nice!"

So there. For those of you wondering if it is worth it to teach. No. Normally it isn't. Normally I am tired, frustrated, and underappreciated.... but sometimes... it really feels like it is worth it.

What about you? What has happened to you lately that has made you feel like your work is worth it?

Why administrators can't always trust students

I've seen a lot of discussions lately talking about the pros and cons of having teacher evaluations.  Personal thoughts:  I think that student evaluations should be done. I think that we should look over evaluations and consider carefully what students have said and why they may have said it. As my boss always tells us when he hands out evaluations, "Let’s remember that even the best surveys tend to provide us with something that we need to think about." At ITESM teachers are graded on a scale of 0-5. 0 being perfect and 5 being... not so perfect. We are expected to get an average of under 2. If we are over 3 we need to seriously re-evaluate our lessons.   However, as far as administration goes, I think that evaluations should, indiviually, be taken with a grain of salt. After all, as the comic humorously shows what the administrator sees is not always an accurate depiction of the class. I do not think a teacher should be given a raise because or good evaluations nor fired because of bad ones. If anything, the evaluations may provide a reason for the classes to be monitored so an administartor can see what is going on first hand. If interested you can check out some of my past student evaluations here and here What do you think? Are student evaluations a valuable tool or simply a way to reward the "cool" or "pretty" teachers.

Reference Words

Another helpful and clever (I think) review of reference words from one of my high school classes. If you teach reference words it may help your students as well.

Comma Commotion!

A presentation my students made about the four main uses of commas



I thought it was pretty cute!

End of the TOEFL Course

Well, my Summer TOEFL Course has just about ended. It was... FAST Trying to cram the entire English language that the TOEFL tests on into one class was hard, teaching for a solid month was harder! I give the students their TOEFL exam in 6 hours. They all have the ability to pass...though I am not sure they will. Some of them get very nervous during the TOEFL; and forget to just breathe and guess. Overall I think the class went well, I used a lot of supplemental material. They listened to songs, watch clips, and did lots of lots of TOEFL worksheets. I can see where I would try to change the class in the future, but for now I feel that I did a pretty good job. How do you teach the TOEFL? Any tips?

My students are not the best inferrers

My TOEFL students REALLY struggled with inference in Wednesdays lesson so I gave them a quick worksheet with simple sentences and then asked them to infer. 

•  Example: "Oh honey you don't have to get be anything for my birthday, just being with you is enough. I am going to go to the store now. I hope that my purse doesn't fall apart on the way there. It is so old!"
• Inference: The person would like a purse for their birthday.

They struggled a little, but they improved a lot! They helped each other and when they were stuck I asked questions:

• Example: An older man is running behind a school bus waving a child's lunch box in the air

Me: When do you run?
Students: To stay fit. Because you are late. To get away from someone etc.
Me: Is the man working out?
Students: No, he has a lunch box.
Me: Why would he run with a lunch box?
Students: He needs to give it to someone
Me: Whom might he need to give it to?

• Inference: The man's child is on the bus and has forgotten his lunch.

One of the statements was:  You are giving a presentation for a large audience, and you notice people are laughing quietly at you while they point to the region below your belt.

My students had NO idea. I even had a volunteer come to the front of the class and stand there while I pointed at his general groin area. They were clueless! Once I explained it they all understood, but I was amazed no one got it.

I talked to my boss and a few other people and they got it right away... I wonder why they had so much trouble.

Do you get it?

Summer TOEFL

Oh TOEFL TOEFL TOEFL. Well, this year I have taught my first TOEFL class ever. It went... well. The class was a TOEFL class and a writing class. Not as many students passed as we would have liked, so when I give the class again in the Summer it will just a be a TOEFL course.

I am in the process of re-writing the course (with supplementary materials to make a 3 hour daily TOEFL course slightly less boring)

I am trying to add some songs whenever possible Madonna's Love Profusion for when we review uncountable nouns (and more importantly the quantifiers that go with them) and mainly because I LOVE the music video "5 people 1 guitar" I used Somebody that I used to know for Subject / Verb agreement.

Hopefully this Summer goes well!

2nd Evaluation

Well I improved! That's always a good thing :)

My boss actually came into my office yesterday to tell me that my evaluations this time had improved. I wouldn't be able to view the evaluations until the 18th, but he just wanted to let me know.

That took some pressure off me and I was not dreading reading my evaluations.

My 7am/3pm classes were a little mixed. They felt that since they needed a good TOEFL grade to pass they should have had more TOEFL practice. We did do TOEFL practice, buta lot of it was "hidden" in other activities. We also did lots of reading, but it wasn't multiple choice TOEFL style.

Anyways, we decided the students are right and we are changing the class to be more TOEFL based. Most the reviews were pretty generic:

"Fun class, i like to go..she makes interesting the class." 

"Sus clases son muy dinamicas, lo que convierte a la materia en una clase interesante y motivadora." 

"muy buena maestra, buenas clases,comprensible y buena para enseñar."

"Excellent! Teacher maybe i really don't love your explanations buy i love the way we practiced all, you put a lot of time to plained our class, i think you were my best english teacher ever! i've learned more english in this class than in all my life really! but all depends about my toefl score, that is the bad thing :c jajajaja but i really will miss you"

"I love this class. Just one thing i do not like; take the class in the afternoon is so annoying. But the class is ok." 
 
Those made me happy since I do try to make class interesting.

My 8:30 class had a lot of duplicates. A few chatty students, but overall I think they did well:

"Nice teacher just a little weird"

"Excelente teacher, me gustan sus clases, siento que pasan bien rápido, me divierto y aprendo."
 
"A very good teacher. The best teacher in the ITESM."

"Excelente profesora, aunque puede llegar a aplicar metodos poco ortodoxos alguna vez, es capaz de llegar a nosotros los jovenes para poder aprender de una manera mas esencial y no solo por 'machetear'."

and finally

"Hello Carissa, you´re a great teacher, although you scream often, it´s okay, because your class is better that way. You´re class is very fun, we always do different things and try to support us in every way. Thanks for the consult, we´ll meet again at you´re office ;)"

So I am improving...I suppose that's good ... though now I am a bit nervous about continuing to improve, I suppose I can just keep trying the hardest that I can. 

Relative Clause Cheat Sheet

My final assignment for my Lengua Extranjera class was to make a cheat sheet for something we had covered. One student did a fantastic job! She made a relative clause sheet that reviewed the basics. I uploaded it to busyteacher (I love this site!).

Check it out, or leave a comment and I'll e-mail it to you if you have problems with the busyteacher site.  

Participial Phrases

I was reviewing the wonderful world of participial phrases for class on Friday and I came across this gem: Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals

I took the lesson and changed it to be able to use a music video (we all know how I love music videos in class). I recently used "Earl had to die" in class to review Cause and Effect. A fellow teacher friends of mine who teaches the same level took the idea but used Lily Allen's smile. A video that I LOVE and am glad she reminded me of. So, this activity uses that:



First, students watch the video and we talk about getting revenge and such (which they like, as we seem to end up on this topic quite a lot).

NAME: CLASS TIME:
First, underline all of the participle phrases; then circle the noun they modify. Half of the sentences are grammatically inaccurate. Re-write them correctly below (include the number).
1. While remembering her ex-boyfriend, Lily gets depressed.
2. Leaning against a wall waiting for a man, the man approaches Lily and she gives him money.
3. The gang, having nodded in agreement, takes money from the man.
4. He was hit by them laying on the floor.
5. After telling her he was just jumped, Lily invites him to coffee.
6. As they are finishing their coffee men are destroying his apartment.
7. When going to the bathroom, laxatives were put in his coffee.
8. Needing to use the bathroom he ran to the toilet only to find it filled with his clothes.
9. DJing he discovered his discs were all ruined.
10. Lily smiles feeling very happy with her successful day.
# __ _____________________________________________________
# __ _____________________________________________________
# __ _____________________________________________________
# __ _____________________________________________________
# __ _____________________________________________________

Later students watched Daniel Poweter's Bad Day video and had to describe it using their own sentences. Some of them:

Closing his eyes he playes[sic] the piano.
Smiling she draws on the wall
Having a bad day he rolls out of bed.

Some of them used the lyrics and got pretty creative.

(Copy of the Lily Allen worksheet can be found here: http://busyteacher.org/8539-lily-allens-smile-and-participial-phrases.html )