Time flies! It is amazing that we only have 4 weeks left and that includes Thanksgiving week... Things went rather well this week for our class, but individual students are starting to feel overwhelmed. All my students are having exams and several papers to turn in right now, and it's just going to get worse until the end of the semester so I am very worried, especially for some of them.
Monday, we worked on reported speech. I had prepared several examples, including examples with different tenses, questions, statements, and imperative sentences, and we worked through them while I was trying to make them think of the rules. I gave them a little trick to check if what they wrote was right: when you say, "he asked me if his car was ready" you can just erase the "question section of the sentence" (he asked me if) and see what you have left (his car was ready). If you can use this last part in your answer AS IT IS, if it is a statement and not a question, then you are good (I told him HIS CAR WAS READY). I bet it works well with the majority of the sentences but not all, but still, it helps to see if you have a question or a statement.
On Tuesday, we went over the interview project and look at a good example. The example talked about this person interviewing a social worker about children with disabilities or something like that and reporting her interview in a very nice manner. What I wanted my students to see was that they did not have to use the "I asked... He said... I asked... He said..." format, because that is quite boring, but that they should organize their report by topics and find nice transitions between ideas. As I was looking at first drafts today, it was interesting to notice that the great majority of the students had copied the format of this example almost sentence to sentence, especially in the introduction and the conclusion. I have been wondering if this is a good or a bad thing, and I guess it can be a good thing since they have had to think about the different "parts" of an introduction and translate those parts into something meaningful for their paper.
What else? On Wednesday, I talked about the Internet and how and why to use it. We talked about different strategies to use to find good information and looked at different search engines, and also discussed how different pages can give reliable information or not. Our textbook gave a good list of questions to ask about websites, to evaluate them, and I had my students go over two different web pages about food to evaluate them using those questions. Finally, I explained the web terminology (root, domain, server, files, directory, etc.) and as I was explaining this, I realized that they did not know much about all this and only two students had ever been exposed to webpage construction or management. I know that other 106i teachers have already had their students make a website and publish their own papers on it, but I always thought that my students probably knew enough about it already and I was also scared to have to deal with the Purdue server! The last reason why I did not want to work on this kind of project is that the computers we are using in our class don't have Dreamweaver but only FrontPage, and I have gone from writing HTML codes directly to Dreamweaver, so I did not want to have to learn FrontPage. Anyway, at the end of the hour, I decided that I was going to do all these things and teach my students how to build simple web pages using FrontPage and how to publish them on the Purdue server. They asked for it! Needless to say, I was scared!
This is why, on Thursday, we first reviewed the web terminology and the way links work, and then I spent some time talking about webpage design, not that I know much about it, but I just showed my students why tables were useful, and how to use colors, fonts, images, links, etc. Then, they took the FrontPage handout I had told them to print and bring to class and I left them fight with their first page. Every time someone was asking a question, I had to try to find the answer myself first... but fortunately, FrontPage is very similar to Words, and I also had a few students who were quick to understand the system and ready to help their classmates. It was a fun activity, actually, since I was not really the one in control there but instead let them experience and learn and fight with the whole thing. I think they really enjoyed it and some students had already done some nice pages by the end of the hour. I really liked doing that. It reminded me of my first days, when I was trying to make a webpage by handwriting HTML codes... it was such a pain, but I learned a lot! I still wish we had Dreamweaver, but maybe it's better to start with FrontPage, which is really simple, and then let them use Dreamweaver once they understand the basic concepts of webpage design. I showed them my very first
index page.... (I wouldn't have known how to make this link if I hadn't learned the HTML codes!) and also another example, a bad one, to explain to them how they could use tables. They were all able to have at least one link from their page to our
106i page and an email link to their email address. Fun! On Monday, we will spend the hour fighting with the Purdue server until everyone has a webpage or two published!
Today, I simply met with all my students to go over their first draft, and talk about how things are going for them. As I said earlier, some of them are not doing so well and missing class or not doing their assignments or simply looking really depressed... so I wanted to talk to everyone individually and make sure everything was OK and let them know I would help them even with their other classes. We talked about their countries, their language, their families, a little, about their other classes, their plans for the Thanksgiving and Christmas break... and I could see that some of them were happy to do it. I told one student in particular to contact the counseling office to talk to someone because he has had many very difficult things to deal with in the last year and is definitely not doing so well. I love all those kids so much! I can say "kids" because today was one student's 18th birthday! They are still so young! I was 23 when I came to the US and it was hard, and I can't imagine being here at 17 and dealing with all those engineering classes, homesickness, language problems, the new INS regulations, roommates, the laundry to learn how to do, etc! One of the other 106i teacher told our mentor group that she had just realized one of her students, from India, had flown directly into West Lafayette last summer and had never left this campus since! Not once! Too much work and no opportunity. Wow... I wish I could organize something nice for those students for Thanksgiving.
