My friend Charlie

Last Thursday our teacher brought a new activity, which was more than a warmer, really. Using a sequence of drawings that she put up on the wall, we had to first guess the name of her friend (Charlie), then describe him (unfit), and after that explain what the reasons behind his problem were (Charlie is unfit because he eats too much, because he smokes too much and he drinks too much, because he doesn't exercise enough and he doesn't sleep enough), to end up guessing what she advised him to do (go to the doctor's). It was a simple activity, in the sense that it required no sophisticated material, but very powerful.

The part I liked the least was actually the beginning, which is always a critical stage in any activity, as the level of engagement of students will depend greatly on it. When it came to describing Charlie (a round human figure on the drawing), our teacher had one specific adjective in mind, and we spent some time throwing words (fat, overweight, big, round, chubby...) until we gave her the "correct" answer (unfit). This is probably a very personal feeling, which I am quite sure most of my classmates didn't share, but I would have preferred our teacher asked us to come up with as many adjectives as we could think of, and discuss the subtleties among them, when it might be more appropriate to use one or the other etc., instead of rejecting what we came up with, when it really wasn't that relevant for the activity, and most of our proposals were equally right. So, having one answer in your mind and asking your students to throw shots until they guess it should be used sparingly, in my opinion, because it can lead to discouragement and the feeling that there is only one right answer, when most of the times there are many.

That brings me to rethink the purpose of the diary. Our teacher requested that we wrote down our feelings during the activities, but in order to improve our teaching skills we should pay more attention to what our students feel, because we want to be the best teachers we can for them, not for ourselves. I know that in many ways my thinking doesn't follow that of most of my classmates, and my reflections on the activity about Charlie can be an example of that. Therefore, I might be more interesting to observe how my classmates react to the activities proposed, rather than analysing how I react myself (or, at least, besides analysing that). I will try to do that from now on.

Continuing with the activity about Charlie, it also felt a bit awkward to repeat the sentences all at once (it reminds me of old ways of doing). Besides, when we recited the sentences together we tended to have a very monotonous tone, very far from normal speaking, and our teacher made us aware of it and asked us to be more natural. It might have been a good idea to ask us to say aloud pieces of the sentences we had created in small groups, one after the other. I remember that in our music lessons in the previous years playing or singing that way was very effective: it kept our attention focused, because we had to follow our turn, it made us give more, because errors were more noticeable in a small group, and it gave the teacher a chance to assess us more individually. Maybe that way we would have kept a lighter rhythm and better intonation. But then again, maybe our teacher wanted it to come out "wrong", so she could make us aware of how artificial we can sound if we don't manage to pick up the correct rhythm.

I found it very amusing to learn grammar in a contextualised way, integrated in a story, and to grasp the way English is talked, with its rhythm and contractions, through a real communicative situation, not on a theoretical and abstract way. After having done two "Charlie exercises" we were ready to apply the idea to a real and personal situation, sharing a personal problem in pairs and giving advice to each other. Relating the activity to oneself is a great resource, because it almost always guarantees to grab attention; we might not care much about what happened to the boy in our English book, and what he should have done, but we will be more interested in explaining something that happened to us last week and listening to what our friend has to say about it. Besides, the way we shared our problems was very thoughtful too: bearing in mind that we might not feel comfortable sharing a personal problem, we wrote it down on a piece of paper, all of them were collected and distributed, so we ended up talking in pairs on problems which were real, but not necessarily ours, which made it easier to talk. Talking was the main objective of the activity, and our teacher took many aspects into account in order to create the most favourable conditions for our learning to happen.