Japan Time

Sunday, November 30, 2008

A bunch of wiseguys I'm dealing with here...

So, I'm not going to lie - this week started out pretty rough. Wednesday and Thursday were really stressful - I walked home from work wondering if I could really do this. But Friday and Saturday were much better; I ended the week on Saturday with a really great group lesson. My students in that class are funny and hardworking, and they were making me laugh so hard on Saturday that my stomach hurt.
The lesson was about softening criticism and there was a lot of focus on phrases like, "I'm sorry, but..." "I'm afraid that..." "Maybe you could try..." Toward the end of the lesson, there's usually a lot of free conversation, where the students are given something to talk about and they have to try and use the target phrases. In this case, I paired them up and gave them different cards with scenarios on them. For example, Student A was a parent and Student B was their child's teacher - they were at a parent-teacher conference and Student B had to inform Student A that their child was doing poorly in school. Since I had an odd number of students, I paired up with someone and the conversation went something like this:
Partner (Student B): "I'm a little concerned with your son's attitude in school."
Me (Student A): "Why? Isn't Bobby doing well? He's so smart and I'm so proud of him."
Partner: "He's very smart, but...I'm sorry to tell you that his last test scores were horrible."
Me: "Horrible?!"
Partner: "Horrible...terrible!"
Me (whispering): "Remember - softened criticism!"
Partner: "Oh, right, right...his test scores were...not so good."
In another scenario, Student A and Student B were married and getting ready to go to a party; Student A had to tell Student B that he/she didn't approve of their spouse's outfit. One of the pairs in my class spent a looooong time on this particular scenario - and when I checked in on them, I found out why:
Me: "What is going on? How can you possibly still be on this scenario?"
Student A: "He says that if I don't like his outfit, he'll just take off all his clothes!"
Meanwhile, Student B is just cracking up, along with me and the rest of the class. Oh, man...that was a perfect way to end a stressful week.

1 comment:

pamjean48818 said...

ANOTHER Streaker?! Fortunately he didn't demonstrate.