Markin 4.0

The week before our autumn break, my first year students all had an all-day test in school, and throughout the vacation I have postponed correcting these papers. Marking papers is not my favorite hobby! Today, however, I received a tool which I hope can help me when assessing written assignments, namely Markin 4.0. I have heard about this tool for some time, and I have also read blogs written by other teachers recommending it. Therefore I am quite excited, and actually looking forward to testing it myself. I guess it will be a slow start and that I will need some time getting used to the buttons and this way of working, but I am still optimistic and do hope Markin will be useful to me, too. I will come back to my experiences later on, but for the time being, I would just love to hear from others who have used it when correcting English papers.

Tip of the day; John Boyne's Website

The other day I came across an interesting web page, the home page of the Irish author John Boyne. I must admit I had not heard a whole lot about him before, but I guess The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is well known to many. One of the objections to not using an ordinary textbook in class has been that it is hard to find modern literary texts elsewhere. On Boyne's page, however, there is a selection of short stories that at least can serve as a starting point when looking for texts to use in class. Give it a go; the page is well worth a visit!



Photo: John Boyne's Website

Thoughts on a sunny autumn afternoon.

I know that there has not been much activity on my blog the last weeks, but I simply have not had the time to write anything lately. Last week our school had 21 students and 2 teachers from Delft in Holland visiting, and that kept me busy 24-7. Though it was busy, the week was a success, (at least that is my impression...). We started off by taking all the students to the mountains for two days, and then had some days for sight seeing in Oslo and workshop in school. I believe this is a good way for young people to get to learn each other better, and I also believe some of them learned a few things about themselves during the week. As for the teachers, I hope the exchange gave them a glimpse of what life is like at Sandvika upper secondary.

This week we have had our autumn break, and I have just enjoyed a week off from school. On Monday it is "back to business", however, and I really need to start thinking about the weeks ahead. Usually the period between the autumn break and X-mas is filled with activities, tests and projects, and this year is no exception. One of the things I am really looking forward to, though, is the huge ICT conference at our school next week. It is always inspiring to attend events like this and to get some ideas for my own teaching.

I have just listened to a debate on the radio where people from all over the country have phoned in and discussed teachers in Norwegian schools. It still amazes me that they never invite any teachers to these debates. While Tom, Dick and Harry are free to express their frustration and spell out what a lousy job we do teaching their children, the voice of the teachers is absent. I am not one of those who believe that things cannot and should not be better in our schools, but I find it quite hard believing that everything can be blamed on the teachers. I will not let this debate ruin my lazy autumn afternoon, however. Time to go out in the sun and just enjoy my day off!

Paired reading

It has been a bit of a slow start in my class this morning. Only half of the students were in the classroom on time, and quite many very obviously too tired to do anything before their first break... Knowing that time flies (and I have also heard that some pigs might fly on a lucky day...), I still have to rush the students through the lesson plan of the week and the topic of Global English. The class I am teaching this morning are the first year students at the course "Health and Social Services", and even if the curriculum is the same as for my other English class, I have to do things quite differently with this group. First of all, almost none of the students in this class likes to speak English in front of the others. Second, many of them are not all that positive when it comes to learning English and some say that there are just too many things they have not learned, so that the gap between their knowledge and our curriculum is too big.

So what do I do? I decided to just go for the text I had planned, "A Global Language" from their textbook Tracks. What I really like about this book is that there is a "shortcut" to many of the texts, so that the weakest students can read a shorter version of the original texts. Today, however, I asked all the students to read the longer text and to use the method of paired reading when doing it. Paired reading is a fairly simple activity and I am sure most have used some kind of version of it at some point in their teaching career. To students sit together and take turns reading one paragraph each. When the first student has finished his/her paragraph, his/her partner has to repeat what the first one has just read. In this way, both students have to be active all the time, either as reader or as listener. I use paired reading a lot in my classes, and I strongly believe this is a good way of working with longer texts. The twist of the day was that I opened up for the students to speak in Norwegian, hoping that that would help them understanding the text.

By now all the students have been through the text twice, once by the paired reading, and once by listening to the text on CD. At the moment the classroom is all quiet and the boy (yes, there is only one boy in this class) and the girls are busy working on some of the activities to the text. The combination of activities from the textbook and from Track's web pages seems to be working fine, and it seems like the slow start this morning has turned into quite a productive working session after all. Indian summer has also come to this part of the country and the sun is shining. I am quite sure it will be a nice day!

Picture: "Early Morning Reading"

Killing them softly?

Tuesday afternoon and my students are working on a text on English as a global language. It has been a long day for them and for me, and we still have 45 minutes to go. They are all quiet, and it seems most of them are doing what I have asked them to do. On the front row one of the girls has fallen asleep, however. It makes me wonder if I am killing my students rather than teaching them English. Today's ordeal is to apply this reading strategy to the reading of the text, believing that it can help them understand the text, remember the content and also learn a few new words. Perhaps this is not the kind of activity to do at the end of the day, but I simply cannot come up with any creative idea on how to do this differently, and they just have to work their way through this text sooner or later. Maybe next week will be more fun and more action? My dream is to have a collection of activities that are not too time consuming that I could use to spice up my teaching. Any ideas out there?



Picture: thisishowyoudoit.com

"Yes, I can"

Subject-verb agreement, a never ending story

Time and time and time again throughout the school year I have to tell my students to check their written texts for subject-verb agreement. It seems like getting rid of these mistakes is almost impossible for some. Several times students have also come to me towards the end of the year and asked me what I actually mean when I say "concord mistakes. I know that we sometimes just have to spell things out to the students, but I must say I get a bit frustrated that they do not ask until the end of the year if they have not understood anything about this grammatical topic...

As an attempt to prevent this from happening this year, and in an attempt to try to teach them all what I mean by "concord" at an early stage, I start off this week's lesson by putting focus on the problem. My plan is to give the students a short introduction to the topic in which I tell some of the basic rules, and that they then work on various tasks individually. Since this will be the first day of English with their brand new computers, most of the activities are taken from a couple of web pages, NDLA and Exploring English. These pages and the activities they offer show me that I am not the only teacher fighting this problem in the classroom...


Picture from "Common English Grammar Mistakes"