Catalina - TP #10

Alberto has definitely dropped the classes. He stopped working with Tony and has changed companies for a larger one with more work and I think he feels like he shouldn’t be coming to the classes that Tony set up. It saddens me; I wish I could do something about it. I insist on Tony calling him, but he has not returned.

Anyway, on Monday I thought trying a Cloze test with ‘Hello Goodbye’ by The Beatles would be a good idea. Boy how wrong I was! And I even thought, before going, that the song would be too simple and they would be a bit disappointed that I considered them such a low level… well, that didn’t happen! ‘Hello Goodbye’ took us about an hour and a half. Beatles, I hate you. We listened to it a ton of times, went over all the vocabulary, spoke about contraries and comparisons, and listened to it another ton of times. The problem was that neither of them believed that they could ever understand the song and they were not capable of comprehending they could get most of the vocabulary through context or even copying it from another sentence, since it was a very repetitive song. This is where their non-academic background really became obvious. When we were finally able to finish the song, they were curious about the other activity I had brought in the sheet. Since we would be talking about comparisons in the song, I thought it would be good to introduce the structure of comparatives and superlatives in English. They were already tired but headstrong about finishing the day activities, so we started out with them. About twenty minutes into the comparatives I suddenly asked myself “what am I doing? This is definitely not a priority to learn, it’s completely grammar based and they are not going to have to apply it to communication any time soon.” That’s when I stopped. And I told them! I told them I think it was wrong that we spent too much time on the theory of comparatives and superlatives because they were not going need to use them immediately and that we should focus on more practical things. We went over some examples they might find: ‘cheaper prices!’, ‘the fastest oil change’, ‘the best deals in town’… and after such a long and grueling session decided to end it there. Ugh! How could I have not realized when I was organizing the class that this was not a good idea?