"Dare to Be Different" Day: Teaching My Second Lesson at Camp Fulbright!

Photo creds: Molly Lockwood, fellow South Korea Fulbright ETA

After Molly taught and right before my turn to teach, a student came up to me and said, "Teacher, you are Jasmine. You look like Jasmine, the Disney character." This is the second student who has compared me to Jasmine. 

Perfect for my topic today!

I was the second ETA to teach this afternoon, and I whiled the time I spent in the back of the classroom taking note of Molly's really creative incorporation of props in her lesson plan, getting ready to provide her written feedback, glancing over my own lesson plan, and generally just working myself up to a state of excitement and nervousness. 

 

LOOKING BEYOND FIRST IMPRESSIONS

My second lesson plan was centered around the idea of "Looking Beyond First Impressions"/ "Not Judging a Book By its Cover." My objective was for students to learn that first impressions are not always fair or accurate, and can often lead to misunderstandings and the unfair treatment of others. 

Using other random photographs of people I found online, I led the class in an exercise that involved showing them a series of images, and asking them to form quick first impressions. They then had to fill out worksheets I had handed out with questions asking for the "character attributes" of the person/people they saw on the photos, whether they would want to be friends with the person/people, and why. 

One of the ways I modeled this activity for the class was by taking taking a photo, showing it to the class, and asking them to answer the same questions as I would later have them fill out on their worksheets individually. 

MODELING A LESSON PLAN: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

This is the photo I used. And, when prompted, these are my students' first impressions of this man based solely on this photo: 

• Gentleman
• Kind to girls
• Yes, I would want to be his friend (said seven out of eight students)

Pause to form your own first impressions of the man in this photo

One student answered that he wouldn't want to be friends with this man because...because of something he couldn't explain. I prompted him to look deeper at the photo and give me the best explanation he could to justify not being friends with this man. 

Student: I don't know! It's intuition. My intuition tells me this is a bad man. 

Me: Ah, okay, so your intuition is also helping you form your first impression of this man? 

Student: Yes

Me: What makes you think he's a bad man? Tell me what it it is about this picture that tells you that. He doesn't look bad to me. 

Student: He looks okay in the picture. I just don't like him. I think he is a very bad man. 

Me: A bad man, huh? Thank you for explaining. We'll return to this photo in a little bit. 

And I went on with my lesson plan. 

High energy and very active in front of the classroom!

LESS IS MORE. LESS IS MORE. LESS IS MORE

Contrary to everything I knew and had been told about "Less is More," I still planned and executed a variety of activities for my class. This worked only because I only had eight students to deal with, and not a full class of 30-40 students in the classroom! I am extremely thorough when it comes to scaffolding and modeling my lessons and so, again, there were different components all leading to my main concept of looking beyond first impressions. Though I was able to incorporate most of these activities today, I was definitely very nervous about time and kept looking down at the clock to check our progress. 

Less is more, Mimi. Less is more! Seriously. 

The switch between student-teacher roles is still a strange one for me, but I am getting better with each lesson!

THE TWIST (OH, HOW I LOVE COMING FULL CIRCLE) 

I showed my students all of the images, and walked around the room checking up on each and every one of them as they filled out their worksheets and occasionally looked up to refer to the images on the board. After our activity was done, I concluded the lesson by revisiting our first image. 

Here it is again - but, this time, with the rest of the photo showing through the dark overlay, with information on who the man is in the photo, and, most importantly, whether or not the students' first impression was fair and/or accurate based on reality. 

Ted Bundy in custody in 1978. Photo courtesy of State Archives of Florida. Now you know why I had to cover up the left side of the photo!

The student who had expressed his dislike of this man based on his intuition yelled triumphantly as the rest of the class screamed in shock and settled back in their chairs groaning half in wonder, and half in dismay. 

Students: [Still in disbelief] Teacher, how could you do this to us?!

Me: Now you know not to rely on first impressions because they can be deceiving! 

Students: [Groaning] Teacher...

How I really ended class: Complimenting a student on his bright orange sneakers. It tied to the lesson, believe me.

Immediately after class, I met up with my CI again and received excellent feedback. He thought I did even better the second time around while I was still undecided whether this one topped the first. Overall, a great personal dilemma to have after teaching a lesson.

We exchanged a few comments about the Ted Bundy photo illustration, and how fortunate I was that the students gave me the answers/the impressions I needed to make the lesson really work. 

CI: That doesn't happen very often, but when it does - when students give you what you need for a lesson - it's awesome. Great job. 

Me: Thank you. It was a gamble, but it worked out! 

I have really enjoyed teaching this group of students for the past two lessons. They have been very engaged and expressive of their opinions in class. I know that I will have different challenges to overcome in my upcoming third practice teaching. 

My third and last practice teaching will be with a different teacher, in a different classroom, and with much-younger elementary students! I am both terrified and extremely curious and excited to see how I will do with this particular group of students. The last time I interacted with younger ones in this kind of capacity was six years ago when I was a YMCA summer camp counselor. Yikes. We will see soon enough! 

MY QUESTIONS FOR YOU: 

In all honesty, what was your first impression of the man in the photo I used to model my lesson for today? Were your impressions similar to the ones my students gave me? Be honest! Share your impressions in the comment box below. 

Camp Fulbright Activity Weekend | Amazing Race: Welcome to Brazil!

This morning, my team prepared our "Amazing Race"-inspired weekend activity for the campers. I volunteered to plan for and coordinate a game that would involve campers "crossing the Amazon" in "Brazil." This was our version of an activity that the OCs had led earlier during Orientation to have each house compete against each other.

It was so much fun to create a "Brazil" in one of the classrooms, and search for appropriate soundtracks to play in the background!

COUNTRIES/CONTINENT IN THE RACE
I believe we also had an Ireland (where campers learned steps to a dance), a France (where they created portraits of each other and then hung them up on "galleries" (aka the hallways)), the U.S. (where campers navigated a subway in New York City), and Antarctica (where they had a snow clothes relay race, made snow flakes, and played freeze tag).

The campers had a lot of fun, especially with the face painting we had them do in Brazil before they could partake in the actual river-crossing activity. Danielle and I helped paint cute designs on the campers' faces and also demonstrated how the activity would look like, while Seijin held the mic and gave instructions. We led the activity for two hours and interacted with about a hundred young campers and Junior Counselors both from Korea and the U.S. This weekend activity took a lot of energy, but I somehow found a reservoir that helped me keep up with the campers' excitement.

At the end of the day, I couldn't tell which of us had had the most fun: the campers, or the ETAs!

MY QUESTIONS FOR YOU
If you were part of the "Amazing Race," which country/continent would you lead with your own campers and what activities would you do with them? Share your ideas in the comment box below.

Signing Up for Homework Help in My Camp Instructor's Classroom

The view of Eric's classroom from the back of the room, where the ETAs usually sit during observation

THE HOMEWORK HELP REQUIREMENT
We are required to participate in at least one "Homework Help" time during Camp Fulbright. I signed up to help out in my CI's class a day after I gave my lesson on "The Interpretation of Dreams" to have more time with the students and to get to know them better, especially since my second time teaching would also be in the same classroom, with the same students. Many of them remembered me as the teacher who gave the lesson on "interpretation of dreams."

In an email, Eric said that his students usually spend homework time catching up on assignments they hadn't finished from earlier on in the day or week. He said that, since the assignments were writing-based and require them to produce "polished" paragraphs summarizing articles and making up fictional stories, we could help by chatting with the students about these writing pieces. He warned us that they are self-motivated enough to sit in isolation and complete everything on their own, and that we might be bored because of this.

THE CHALLENGE OF PRODUCING ORIGINAL CONTENT
I went anyway and accomplished what I set out to do: talk each student individually and gauge their speaking and writing abilities by peaking over their shoulders as they wrote and, later, asking them questions about their content. The boys finished first, but it appeared that they had merely copied a few significant sentences from their assigned articles and stitched them together as their own "summary." I tried to explain that this was plagiarism, but the concept of plagiarizing seemed foreign to them.

I was forewarned about this during our teaching workshops! I will have a couple more weeks to figure out how to deal with this should it arise in my own classroom.

The girls worked slower but appeared to produce more original content as far as summarizing their articles.

ERIC'S CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENT
Eric had given each of them a picture isolated from the news articles they came from. Their task was to observe the picture and, based on what was going on in them, write a fictional story. Later, they would receive the news articles that the pictures originally came with and see how "close" their fictional stories were to the actual news stories.

Eric: This is to give them a creative writing exercise. [In general, Korean students do a lot of memorization and do not have as much opportunity to exercise their imaginations].
Me: Wow, this is such a cool activity!
Eric: ...No, not really. 
Me: ...what?! I think it is. I would have never thought of something like this.
Eric: No, believe me, it's not that creative. You could easily come up with something better. 

He waved me off and instructed me do whatever I wanted in the classroom: study for my own classes, sit and chillax in a corner, or talk to the students. Seeing that I was unwilling to sit and chillax in a corner, he gave me the task of giving the students the articles after they were done writing their fictional stories. It was a small task, but there really wasn't much he needed help with.

MY QUESTIONS FOR YOU
How would you go about explaining the concept of "plagiarism" to a young student? If you were giving a writing assignment, how would you ensure that the students create their own content instead of merely plucking a few sentences from the text they're working with? Any ideas would be welcome! Please share them in the comment box below.

Discovered My Favorite Korean Snack Just in Time for My Study Session!

Mrs. Shim wasn't kidding. Our Donghae trip really was the only time we would get to relax before being hit by the two-week tidal wave that is Camp Fulbright. Camp Fulbright is described on the Fulbright website as "Korea's most comprehensive, dynamic, and exciting" English camp, bringing together young people from all over Korea who are interested in receiving deep immersion in the English language and in making friends from the United States. The campers attend classes and play in and around Jungwon, communicating with each other in nothing but English (or so they agreed to do when they signed their contracts). Meanwhile, the ETAs are given the opportunity to teach a total of three classes during these two weeks, giving us the chance to engage with and teach Korean students before being placed in our schools. The program is designed to be a win-win situation. 

With all that said, tomorrow is a very big day and I have to pick up a lot of work that I left unattended during the weekend. 

REASONS WHY TOMORROW IS A BIG DAY:

• My Lesson Plan #2 is due at 11:59 p.m. tonight.
• I am scheduled to observe someone else's class at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow.
• My Korean language quiz #2 is immediately after at 11:00 a.m. and
• I teach my first class tomorrow at 2:25 p.m., right after observing and evaluating another ETA's teaching performance. 

No big deal. 

I wandered into the university mart and looked for something I could snack on while studying a hundred vocab words. This is what I found:

Round, chocolate-covered crackers!

I ate an entire box tonight and didn't even get through all of the vocab! I will have to avoid the mart for a few days to recuperate from all of this unhealthy goodness...