Yesterday was our last day of school at P.R. Khatiwala before Diwali vacation, which our school has off from October 15-November 4. In order to conclude the last few days, then, I’ve been trying to wrap up current lessons and abstain from starting any new chapters, since I didn’t want to break off partway through a story and have them forget it over vacation.
Before vacation, though, I had two periods left to fill with my 7-A class in the English medium, my difficult class of the moment. Things have been going very well this term with my 6th standard and 8th standard classes, and they seem to have no problem understanding my pronunciation or explanations for the lessons, but 7-A has the worst time keeping quiet as well as the hardest time understanding. When I tried to move slowly through the lessons to make sure they all understood, they’d stare at their hands or out the windows or fall asleep on their desks… when I tried to move a little more energetically, I’d achieve the same result. Thus it came as little surprise that they didn’t understand the lesson once we’d completed it, but I’ve been trying to figure out what I can do to get them more engaged.
Since I didn’t want to begin reading the new story (a rather strange take on “The Ant and the Grasshopper” which describes an elderly man and his ‘uncouth’ younger brother, the black sheep of the family, who swindles money from everyone and never works) I was left with a rather dry and lengthy list of vocabulary words that it would be necessary to cover before reading the story.
Generally, the students are given the task of writing down these “words to know” at the beginning of the lesson. This, predictably, does not assure that they actually learn the words, but does assure that their notebooks look fuller. The list also is never sufficient to cover all the difficult words in the text. In addition to the 25 vocab words given in the chapter, I found an additional 15 as I read the story.
This gave me 40 words to teach to 40 kids in two periods. And this in the face of it being their final two English periods before break, so they were all geared up to argue vehemently for their right to slack off and play games.
Fun?
So I got myself psyched up about it. I planned to use funny examples that relate to their life (which is getting increasingly easy as I start to know them a bit better and remember what it is that 7th graders find funny) in order to bring home the definitions.
Speaking of which, ‘bring home’ was one of the phrases I had to teach them.
“To ‘bring home to’ means to make sure someone understands something. As your teacher, it’s my job to ‘bring home’ this lesson to you… and if I’m not doing my job, you need to tell me!” I told them.
As I was about to move on to the next word in the list, Jayushi, my star pupil of 7-A, was waving energetically at me from a front row.
“Yes?”
“So ma’am, if we don’t understand the lesson, you will come to our home!” she beamed at me. Haha.
“Yes, exactly.” The rest of the class was chatting, so I called their attention back to me. “Did you hear that? If you don’t understand the lesson, then I will come to your home, and we will do the lesson all day!” This got a laugh, and I thanked Jayushi for her perfect, punny explanation.
Using examples of mischievous little brothers to explain ‘uncouth’ and stealing chocolate to explain ‘vindictive’ we got through the forty words in just over a period.
“Done! Game!” came a few cries, and they all started preparing their retreat from English… but little did they know, I wasn’t done yet.
“No, wait—now we have another activity. We’re going to illustrate these words. We’re going to draw pictures.”
“????”
“Each one of you is going to get a piece of paper with one of the words on it, and you need to draw the meaning of that word. I know some of you will be confused on what to draw, so I’ve written some ideas for you at the top of the page. I don’t want to hear that anyone can’t draw, because I think everyone can draw stick figures, right?” I drew a rough, awkward stick person on the board. The class laughed. “See, everyone can draw this, no? I’ll do the first word for you as an example.”
I glanced at my stack. The word was ‘discreditable’. I had written, by way of suggestion, ‘someone who has fallen in the mud.’ In order to explain the word, I had told them that they were all expected to be very good students since they go to P.R. Khatiwala, so we have a good opinion of them. We think that they dress very well and behave very well… so if, on Sunday, they are playing in the mud and one of the teachers sees them, it would be very discreditable to them!
So I drew a little stick student sitting in a puddle of mud, with a look of horror on his face, and a stick teacher with her hands on her hips, scowling at him.
The class laughed, both at the silly state of the characters on the board, and the expressions on their faces.
“OK, so it’s not very good, but it’s easy to understand, right? I want you all to draw something like this!”
As I passed the papers around the room, I half expected the class to try to thrust them back at me, as they sometimes do when I try to bring in outside assignments that aren’t part of the regular curriculum, but to my pleasure and astonishment they all took them up, some with exclamations of excitement of “Oh! I have ‘investments’! Hmm…”
One girl did look at the sheet doubtfully and told me earnestly, “But ma’am, this is not done!”
“Well, it’s done now.”
They were perhaps the quietest they’ve ever been in my class. Every student completed some manner of drawing for me, and we’re going to hang them at the front of the room when we DO finally read the story, after break. (Then, when they ask me, "Ma'am, what does this word mean??" I can point at the picture and say, "It's right there. Whoever drew this picture can explain it.")
So their day of partying yesterday, which included their singing an organized and unrelenting chorus of Hindi songs, complete with the boys doing imitations of obscene Western dances, was well-deserved.
I really WILL miss them over break.
And hopefully they’ll remember the definitions, for once.
Namaste,
Dalena
I absolutely love these pictures. Thanks for posting them!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteyou perfectely know how to teach this kids... was difficuly but you managed..
ReplyDeletethe words are very well explained by the kids.
good job.
Hiren.