supervisor meeting

Nummon called a meeting this morning with me and Pear, the student teacher. She had lots of questions for me that probably should have been asked months ago, such as:

Which students are misbehaving or giving you trouble in class?
Which students are helpful in class?
and
How are they doing on their worksheets?

She asked how I normally operate the class. I told her I explain the lesson, give them a few examples, let them do the worksheets on their own, and circulate through the room to help. I told her I grade their work as they finish so they can see what they did wrong.

What do the students do while they wait for you to grade?

"Oh, they wait in line, naturally." (Lies! They run all over the place like the little miscreants they are.)



She told us the students have had trouble with the writing sections on the tests. Specifically, writing paragraphs.

I'm not positive, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that we never have them practice writing paragraphs in class. I told her as much.

She said the students should be able to apply everything they've heard and learned, putting it together in the form of a paragraph. She doesn't want students to write paragraphs in class because "if the test is exactly the same as what they do in class, they don't learn anything." She said they'd memorize the paragraph and copy it. Never mind that whole notion of changing the writing prompt...



The next item of business was equally baffling:

How many words do the students know?

"How many words do the students know?!"

Yeah. What you think? 100? 1,000?

I couldn't say how many words I know in Spanish, much less give an estimate for another person's knowledge of their foreign language.

"Um... I'm not really sure. I mean, they should know quite a lot of words," I stammered. "They know foods, jobs, clothes, verbs, sports..."

She wanted us to devise ways to test the students' vocabularies.

I suggested we give them all a sheet of paper and say, "OK; you have five minutes. Write all the foods you know. Next, you have five minutes to write all the verbs you know..." and so forth.

That method was far too rational. We have to quiz the class (individually?) using flashcards and make a worksheet asking them to translate a bunch of Thai words into their English equivalents.

I'm glad I could give my input. Meeting adjourned.