Chris: Update on Everything

I'll try and update you all on everything so far, which my sound like a lot. As of right now, I'm in contact with my tutee, although we didn't get to meet each other last Tuesday at CIES. During that lonely time, Tony and Hunsoo took me under their wings and we all had an interesting conversation. We talked about anything from Korean music to tricky English topics. The three of us ended up going to eat at a Korean restaurant later that night. I'm excited to meet my TP and get to know him. His name is Pete and that's about all I know so far.

I also haven't met my conversation partner, Asier, yet. I know that he's from Spain and I'm sure I'll get to meet him very soon. During tea time last week, I talked with Adal (Emin) from Turkey, who was in need of a CP too. We talked for a bit about Turkey, which was interesting to me because my sister's boyfriend is from there and I have a good friend on exchange there this year. I was surprised at the number of Turkish students at CIES.

On Monday, I started the week off right, with a class observation bright and early. I sat down in an Intermediate Grammar class, only to get right up again. It was a quiz day, so everyone went a couple rooms down into the computer lab. The quiz format was impressive and I took a lot of notes on it. Ross, the teacher, let me actually take the quiz (lucky me!), although I got the feeling I had an unfair advantage. The first part consisted of some sentences with grammatical mistakes in them. Ross told me that they were actual mistakes that the students had made in class. The students had to correct the mistakes. There were two speaking parts; one utilized the past tense and the other was about plans in the future. The cool part was that the students then had to listen to the clip they recorded on their computers and transcribe what they said (without correcting mistakes). Ross told me that this not only helped the students hear what they are saying incorrectly, but also made it easier to grade the quizzes. The last part directed the students to follow a link to a youtube video and answer some questions about it. So, I went into the class expecting to observe a grammar lesson, but I learned a lot about the evaluation aspect regardless.

Great things to come: meeting my TP and CP and more class observations!