Ioana_CO3

I visited Travis' class on Tuesday and I learned more about how to teach level 1 students better. The class started with attendance, it was a pretty small class. The students were told the plan for the day and that the last 5minutes they would interview me. Travis went over a TED talk with the class and had a worksheet for them to fill out. They listened to a talk about success. Travis also mentioned that the talk was faster than the one from last week by asking te students wha they thought afterwards. The first time they listened to the talk they went through the whole way without stopping. The second time Travis told them to look out for the answer to the first question. Travis stopped the video and asked what the answer was. They also went over the vocabulary of the question that could be a little challenging for the students. After goin through the question they moved on to the second question. It was a fill in the blank and it was a little difficult for the students. Travis tried to get the answer from them by askin other fill in the blank questions about "when you like soccer a lot you blank soccer". They were all Arab in the class and got confused when some examples were mentioned but when parents were mentioned, they understood it was love. I found that interesting, I'm not sure if it has to do for language or cultural reasons that it happened that way. They went through the rest of the lesson and then asked me some questions.

One student asked me a very awkward question about how my husband would feel if I tought English abroad. It was very hard to explain to him that I didn't want to get married soon and that even if I did get married that my husband and I would decide together then. It was a question I definitely did not expect at all. They also said that I looked middle eastern a bit, I was a little confused but flattered too because i think middle eastern women are very pretty. Hopefully it was a complement?

The one critique I had of the lesson was that the subtitles on the video were VERY wrong. The words that the speaker said did not match very much and I felt that some of those words were key words. I wonder if it's better to just not have subtitles at all if they're that bad. I mean I could see where they got the word for the subtitle but it changed the meaning completely. Any thoughts about what to do with subtitles?