Europe, the placement test and ...

Here are three more firsts

1. Talked about Europe.

To my students, I mean.

Usually "do you have any questions" has the same effect on a class of Japanese students as "anyone makes any sound and I'll kill every single one of you." But not in my Thursday afternoon class. 

One mechanical engineer in particular has been very good at coming up with questions. One question he asked, after I'd set them their presentation projects, was "Why do we have to give a presentation?"

I was a bit stumped. Isn't it obvious?

A couple of weeks later, the same student asked, "Could we hear you give a presentation?"

"Of course," I told him, then set up an online forum in which each person in the class could write a suggested topic. 

Some of the topics were quite good. They asked my what it's like to be a teacher, and who I think are good and bad students.

Also they asked about my favourite food, my hairstyle and about a romantic date with my wife. 

I gave them a short-list of three to choose from: A strange experience, Europe, and Why English? Europe came out as the most popular topic. 

There had been two suggestions relevant to Europe: please tell us what is happening in Greece, and tell us about the countries you have been to.  So I tried to combine an introduction to the EU with a tour of countries in Europe that I'd visited, an investigation of the origins of the English language, an in-depth discussion of the Greek crisis,  and the strange experience of my wallet getting stolen on an Athenian tram. The last anecdote may have told them more about the Greek crisis than my more formal discussion, but I didn't get to either.

I started off asking them how many countries were in Europe. It only took three or four answers for them to get to the correct one, which is 51. At least it was on Thursday. This was quite a good lesson in itself, since the number of countries in Europe is one of those facts that keeps changing. When I was at school there were only about twenty countries in Europe. There may have been two Germanies, but there was only one Czechoslovakia, one Yugoslavia, and pretty much everything east of that was the Soviet Union. Or at least that's what they used to tell us.

Then my students had to name those countries, and they did a pretty good job, soon coming up with Andorra and Lichtenstein and even being able to spell the latter.

Then I gave a brief history of the EU, its beginnings in Benelux and coal and steel production, and steady spread South, North, West and East. There was time to tell them about the Schengen area and the Euro, which may have direct relevance to them if they ever travel or work in Europe.
Then I had a dozen or so photos from trips to the UK, Ireland, France, Denmark, Austria and Italy over the past ten years. I skipped over the origins and influences of the English language, and got as far as a slide with the masks of Tragedy and Comedy. This was the opener to my section on Greece, which I recommended they follow in the news.

2. Asked a business class to take the ERF Placement Test.

I've been trying to get the class of label printers I teach every couple of weeks to read. For the most part they are not reading, but I think it's working for some of them. They'd recently got CASEC test scores, which their company is using to gauge their progress and determine their promotion. Most of them had improved, by some quite large margins. They seemed to attribute this to my lessons. I tried to disarm them of this misconception, but not too hard.
In discussion of their scores we got into the amount that luck accounts for, in view of the test being multiple choice. If there are a hundred questions and you know the answers to sixty, then guess the other forty, you're likely to get ten of them right, so your score is going to be seventy. At least it is going to tend towards seventy. There's a very small chance you'll get sixty, and an even smaller chance you'll get a hundred, but it's unlikely to be exactly seventy. For example, if you flip a coin four times, there's more chance that you'll get a different number of heads and tails than getting the same number.

This reminded me of the Extensive Reading Foundation Placement Test, so I decided it was an excellent opportunity to get them to take it.

There was a new student visiting from the head office who gave a self introduction, so there was no time to go into the statistics of the test, and what goes on under the bonnet. Maybe next time.

3. Watched Cloud Atlas.
I was going to watch a new movie in my health science class, but couldn't decide on one and in the end showed them a couple of scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean, which I've used loads of times. It did include respiratory problems and some primitive first aid, but was not that relevant to their field.

At home I watched Cloud Atlas, which was quite interesting. Written by a lad from Southport who lived in Japan, and directed by the Wachowski brothers it had some great performances. Tom Hanks was so good I thought he was Tim Robbins at first. Some of the make up was impressive, but they didn't do a very good job making western actors look like Korean men. Or maybe they were supposed to be aliens. Or outtakes from the Matrix. I probably need to watch it again. Or I should probably read the book.