Wish I'd found this sooner...

Even though we're almost done teaching in Argentina, I'm sure some of you are not done with teaching.  I'm not!

I stumbled upon this website that's by a collective of "radical teachers" in NYC. Here's a page of lessons that can be used to integrate themes of social justice, discrimination, racism, and other subjects that can be difficult to teach, but are, in my opinion, relevant and necessary.

http://www.nycore.org/curricula.html

These lessons are very comprehensive and integrate different forms of media and are interdisciplinary in nature.  I think they're great for EFL or ESL because they address issues that are deeply embedded in US society and that some international students might not be so familiar with, although on the other hand maybe such lessons can help them make a connection between the US and their home country.  I hope you like it.

Love, Kristal

Group Poetry

Hey Guys -- I don't know if anyone is still looking at this thing, but hopefully so.

I had a good lesson today, inspired by Dead Poet's Society. It could last anywhere from 10 minutes to a good half an hour or more. 

I started by asking them if they had seen Dead Poet's Society. Many of them had. I asked them to recall a scene in which Robin William's character asks his students to go home a write a poem and them come back and read it to the class. One student doesn't and Robin Williams procedes to bring this student to the front of the class and evokes this fabulous poem out of him.

Then I asked them if poetry was useful in a conversation class because most people don't talk in poetic language in everyday life. We talked about how poetry grows out of feeling and how in order to express feeling, you have to have an advanced command of language and the more diverse your vocab is, the better you can express things, etc.

From there, we played word association (one person says a word, the next person says the first word they think of, and so on) to warm up. From there, we began creating a group poem. I started with "The waves crashed against the shore." We live in Mar del Plata near the beach, hence the sea reference. From there, we went in a circle, adding lines as I wrote exactly what they said on my computer. At the end we had a poem which I read to them. They LOVED it and were really excited about their poem (Everyone asked me to send it to them by e-mail). This activity could be modified to take up more or less time, depending on your need (creating different poems, different themes, poems from different groups). Hope your classes enjoy! :)

The poem we created is below:

Untitled

The waves crashed against the shore

The woman looked to the sea

She saw the seagull

Flying across, around... I don't know the preposition

Use the one that goes

And she was holding her son's hand

She felt peaceful

She was pondering her past

To see made her feel

Peaceful

Thinking about what to do the next day

She flung her arm's open wide

And hugged her son

And that's it.

No!

I kept on watching

As I felt the sea breeze on my face

I was dreaming

Such a wonderful view

Made me remember

My childhood

A long time ago.

Wiki for Lesson Exchange!

Hey!
Here's a wiki compliments of Rachel from Chile.  If you'd like to add anything to the wiki (and if you're gonna take you should give back!) email her at:

rsloughATgmail.com... like @ but we're trying to avoid spam.

Here's a link if you wanna check it out... it's a work in progress and hopefully we can keep this going!

Hip hop and you don't stop

Our party's location has been confirmed:

HIP HOP AND YOU DON'T STOP

feat. invited deejay DJ Mobil (from Brasil)

Friday, July 4th - 11:55 pm until the next morning

at FRIDA Bar - Calle 5 e/ 54 y 55

Check out our Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=21917927236

A game about cultural integration

In my English III sections we just finished watching the independent film Smoke Signals, which I love. Our discussion of the US and Argentina's treatment of their first peoples segued nicely into a discussion about our shared immigration history. We discussed terms like assimilation, pluralism, multiculturalism, interculturalism, melting pot, salad bowl, etc. Ooh! Also if anyone has Fievel: An American Tail or Fievel Goes West DVDs on hand send it over, we'd love to watch it! Haha!

Anyway, here's the game:

FOR ALL LEVELS OF ENGLISH (I used it in English III)
Time: Between 15 minutes and an hour, depending on how complicated you want to make the rules.

You divide the class into two different groups. Each group represents a "culture." Each culture has rules that you make up. Here are some we used today:

Group 1. You can say anything but before speaking you must hug the person to whom you are directing your comment. One person is chosen as the leader. Everyone else has to copy this person's gestures.
Group 2. Affirmations are not allowed in this culture - you can only speak in questions. You can not speak unless you are sitting first.
Group 3. No touching people is allowed. You can only speak by asking questions and saying "yes" or "no."
etc. etc. The rules can get pretty creative. They'll do a good job coming up with their own if you repeat the game.

Once each group is clear on the rules, they will each send a visitor to see the other group. This visitor can stay until they break some rule of the culture they are visiting, at which point they will be sent back. A new visitor will be sent about every 2 to 3 minutes or whenever the visitors are eliminated, whichever comes first. After each cycle of visitors, the groups can confer with the visitors they sent to the other group to try to figure out the rules of the other culture. The game ends either when they figure out the rules of the other culture or when the time runs out, whichever comes first.

The best part of this activity was wrapping it up as we discussed the fears, anger, frustration, confusion, etc. that they felt trying to figure out the rules of the culture they were visiting. After hearing the stories of visitors from their own cultures, many of them who went later had developed preconceived notions about what the other culture's rules were like. This metaphor was really powerful as we started talking about more abstract concepts like inter-cultural contact, cultural relativism vs. universality, models of cultural integration, immigration, etc...

Hope you have as much fun with it as we did!
Charly

I don't mean to misuse the blog...

but I just wanted to remind you that there is a 4th of July party in La Plata to which you're all invited!  Come dance your homesickness away to the hip hop soundtrack of your life.  This will be cultural understanding at its finest...

Love, 

Kristal