I decided to use the 2000 movie Equilibrium (Starring Christian Bale and Sean Bean) as a backdrop for the week, and to give us discussion topics. We watched the English version, but had Korean subtitles. Well, the http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifdiscussions didn't quite work as I intended, since everything took much longer than I expected, but we did get to work on pronunciation, public speaking practice, song listening and singing, and speaking through English games. I'm not sure it was exactly a conversation camp, but then, I'm not entirely sure what a conversation camp IS in South Korea where the students are either too shy or too modest to speak without prompting or distraction. :) Here's the movie poster that appeared in South Korea.
The movie worked well. It has fantastic action, good suspense, not TOO much dialogue, a little light romance, a bit of comic relief, and good themes about the human condition. I was surprised by the amount of pictures and material out there about the movie. True, I had to make a lot of my own screen captures for the review quizzes, but many of the pictures were accessible through a google image search. There's a comprehensive fansite out there too: Equiibrium Movie Fansite. I enjoy the movie too, so it wasn't drudgery watching it 3+ times over 2 weeks (including the times I watched ahead of time for planning). These are some highlights from the movie.
Scheduled topics included: Welcome day and intro to Utopias, talking about art and music (and censorship), talking about family, talking about foods and smells, and then having a party and talking about the movie.
The first two days weren't particularly picture-worthy, though it did begin to snow the first Tuesday and a couple of my students spent their break time making snowmen which they brought indoors to share with me. :P
I did get some pictures of students playing the family-favorite game Battleship and making family trees on the third days too. Battleship was a wonderful activity, because, while the students weren't necessarily inventing their own statements, they still had to do a lot of unpracticed English speaking and listening to use the modified grid to make guesses. Instead of calling out letters and numbers, students would ask a generic question with a specific noun representing each square. For example, "Do you like... [cheese/pizza/kimchi]" or "Do you have a... [teacher, brother, mother." I teased some of them a little when I heard them asking if the opponent had a mother when the opponent had no ship there and they had to answer no. ;)
Family trees were fun to make since their families are so varied. You can see a lot of cultural landscape of Korea's past by looking at those trees. One girl's mother had 10 siblings (all older than her), but many of them had died in childhood. You could sense some of the hardships from Korea's recent past (and sometimes relationally turbulent present). English and Korean languages both have TONS of words related to family, but they work completely differently so students had quite a challenge reviewing family vocabulary.
Especially memorable about camp was the smelling and cooking day though! We began the class with a mystery smell test. the weeks varied somewhat based on the ingredients I had on hand, but you can get the general idea. Can you guess what they are without the smell? It's tricky! I wish I had gotten pictures of their expressions while they were smelling these things! I covered the cups with foil punched with holes, but they managed to shake out a little on some of the items anyway.
Then we cooked! Chocolate time! I remembered someone posting on Facebook a few months ago about Oreo truffles, and that seemed like a good, no-bake recipe to use for camp. Half of the ingredients I had on hang already for the first week, though I did have to go shopping for more supplies for the second round. I asked my managing co-teacher about that lesson and she borrowed a key from the home ec. teacher, and scurried all over the student kitchen helping me find supplies and small gas grills in preparation for cooking day. It was fun getting to work with her like that, even if I was teaching on my own for the actual camp itself.
The class descended into organized chaos, but it felt like the atmosphere we sometimes had in my Spanish conversation class back at TTU sometimes. High energy, people excited about activities, almost forgetting they were trying to speak in another language, and getting intensively involved in the interaction. Students were forced to make sentences quickly with me in order to communicated about the chocolate burning, or not having something to set their dripping truffles on. It was sort of amazing. Exhausting, ridiculously expensive, and frenzied, but cooking was well worth the effort.
Students took several days to get comfortable speaking and interacting, and in the first grade (high school, remember. They call freshmen 1st grade, juniors second grade, and seniors 3rd grade. Only 3 years of high school) the students were particularly bashful about speaking across gender lines. The cooking took place on the fourth day both weeks, and that was the class both times in which students really opened up and had fun, or spoke in English without remembering that they felt shy about it. I knew all the students the first week, but I hadn't taught any of the second graders in the second week, so the class had a rather different dynamic. Not bad, but definitely not the same rapport. Here are some of my first grade girls with me.
Let me just say it: I don't think I throw very interesting parties. I could be wrong about this though, since they seemed to enjoy the day anyway. The last day of camp seemed a little flat both times, but at least I put on music the second week. ;) Still, students were appreciative of the snacks I brought, and they enjoyed getting to eat their finished truffles that had been cooling in the school fridge overnight. I was impressed by their speeches at the end of both weeks, and had some very nice ACTUAL conversations with students during the casual downtime portions of the fifth days. Oh yes, I made them sing "waddle-ee-a-cha" with me on the last day after practicing as a class all week.
Oh well, I think they had fun anyway. And there's camp for winter 2012, over and done!
No comments:
Post a Comment