We embarked onto our first class for Spring '12 on Saturday the 11th at CDC in the Industrial Area. As was the case in the previous year, our group comprised of Fawwaz and I though Ahmed served as the new entrant after we had lost Aveed to a multitude of university courses and, ostensibly, lack of interest, though he never agreed to the latter assessment. Though drowsy-eyed, we were elated with expectant spirits at the prospect of meeting a few of our older students and at the idea of getting free apple juice from the nice manager who spoiled us in Spring '11.
The following pictures chronicle the same morning ritual of quick revisions and teaching strategies we followed last year, albeit with Aveed:
This picture shows Ahmed going through the lesson plans for the day, while contemplating a blog entry. Of course, he was not able to get through the said entry because his laptop is a piece of junk. (sorry bro)
This picture shows my arrival and bafflement at the sheer amount of paper on the table, while considering stealing a croissant or a scone from the breakfast provided for the CS4Qatar high-school students.
This is a picture Fawwaz forced me to take, chastising most of my attempts for not getting his 'good side'. And, of course, he is sitting in his usual conceited stance, intoning delusional verses of self-supremacy while Ahmed and I struggled to stay awake.
After we had gone through the routine of organizing the material for the class, we made our way to the main parking lot to embark on our journey. Our designated driver had arrived before time, so all of us felt guilty for making him wait. Once we were on our way, however, a little of the guilt faded with every pot-hole we hit along the Industrial Area road. It was not a long journey though, we reached CDC in about 20 minutes, not as drowsy anymore and ready to begin our lessons.
The gentlemen at the back were part of our class for the day.
We were pleased to find out that we would have a much larger class this time around. We would be teaching about 19 students, as compared to just 11 in the previous semester. Sadly though, only one of our previous students, Suresh, would be returning for the class this year. We briefly re-kindled fond memories of the year past, while we waited for our class to be cleaned and made ready for the teaching session ahead.
We began the session in 15 minutes following our arrival, the following photos chronicle the session:
Here, we can see Ahmed endowing our students with a plethora of scholarly concepts. Since the students seemed to know a lot more than he did, he stopped midway to continue with general introductions as planned.
Our students listen patiently as we describe the extension to our first activity, a slightly more advanced version of introductions now including more variables such as: nature of work, work-hours, and level of satisfaction with work.
Fawwaz writes down the different variables involved in the said activity. The students seemed to grasp these concepts with quite some ease, something we had not expected.
We then asked the students to introduce themselves to each other, further reinforcing a general understanding of English.
Our students complete their pre-test. We waited till the end of our first activity before handing them out, hoping introductions would serve as a warm-up towards their English skills.
Here I debrief our students on the activities about to follow. Most of them reacted with joy at the prospect of group-work, some seemed indifferent. Fawwaz seemed fidgety as usual because he has some unusual form of OCD.
Here, Ahmed described our group activity to the students in much more detail. Explaining how students will be grouped in 4's, each given a set of images, and they are required to work through the images in their groups and name each image.
The activity went on pretty well, with a good amount of participation within each group. Nearly every one got every image right, which reinforced a sense of stronger expectation within us. Maybe next week, we will work them a little harder. We did notice some disparity within the knowledge of English between the students; most students struggled with concepts we tested them on but about four or five students seem to have a strong grasp of the language. One of the students even asked us, after we were done with class, whether we would like to give routine classes because he felt that, although he had a bachelors degree, lack of experience with English put him at a severe disadvantage. Although, we would have been happy to comply with his request, we had to politely decline due to lack of time and grueling academics.
We had one more photo of our students working in groups but, apparently, this blog wont allow us to post it up. Therefore, I am forced to end here, and not because I have run out of interesting things to say, because I haven't, you know?
No comments:
Post a Comment