On Wednesdays I have two 7th grade classes, back to back. Both of them have a couple of surly, too-cool-for-school students, it’s that age, but the 2nd class is definitely worse than the 1st.
Today, my lesson plan was inspired by something my friend Bubu used to do when he was teaching English here in Prague, before he decided he wanted to live in Tehran, translating Persian poetry into English. It’s a decision I don’t understand, but that’s not the point of tonight’s blog.
He used to do an exercise with “Mr. Paper.” What can Mr. Paper do? It’s a good way to find out all the verbs the students know and maybe teach them some new ones. Instead of having all of the students cut a man out of paper, I just drew a robot on the board and gave them the starter sentence “My robot can ______.”
With the first class, it worked like a charm. We covered the blackboard with sentences, they were asking me how to say different things, everybody was participating, and some of the ideas actually were quite clever. “My robot can make me laugh.” “My robot can water the flowers.” “My robot can choose my clothes.”
I thought “This is great, it’s an easy lesson, surely it will work with the next class as well.” Hah.
I began to introduce the topic and one girl (one of the 3 constant troublemakers in the class – but they are all different – D actually speaks good English and thinks she is being funny, so I have hope she may come around in the end – A is just sullen and pouty and resentful of my authority, I’ve no idea what I can do with her – and N, the one I’m talking about, is just plain weird- I’m not sure if she’s actually smart, or nuts, or both) pointed out that the word robot is a Czech word.
At first, I just said yes, that’s true, but I tried to breeze past it because it wasn’t my lesson plan, but she just continued talking, so I decided to address the subject. I asked if anybody had read the play (R.U.R., by Karel Čapek, 1920), meanwhile she was still talking, but nobody understood the word “play” so I explained (translated) that and she was still talking and I asked her if she had read or seen the play and she said “what play, what are you talking about?” and I explained it again and she was still talking and none of the students had actually read the play or even heard of it, and so I told her to shut up but she didn’t so I yelled at her to shut up and that brought some other students in on her side, one of the brighter girls said “Why don’t you answer her when she’s speaking in Czech?” and I said “Because she’s speaking in Czech, and also (I probably shouldn’t have said this) because she’s an idiot,” but she, all this time, was just merrily chattering away and so I yelled at her and made her go sit in the back of the room, and then we sort of got started with the lesson but there was still a lot of crosschat, and students standing up and walking around, and me yelling at various students to sit down and shut up, and then I let N come back to her seat, and then the director of the school walked in and decided to monitor the class for awhile, I figured that was not coincidental and I was right, another teacher had complained about the noise, and as long as the director was there they acted like little angels and we had sort of a decent lesson.
So, 1 win, 1 loss, but it’s still a good lesson plan and I’ll use it again. If I don’t get fired.
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