MetaChat REGISTER   ||   LOGIN   ||   IMAGES ARE OFF   ||   RECENT COMMENTS




artphoto by splunge
artphoto by TheophileEscargot
artphoto by Kronos_to_Earth
artphoto by ethylene

Home

About

Search

Archives

Mecha Wiki

Metachat Eye

Emcee

IRC Channels

IRC FAQ


 RSS


Comment Feed:

RSS

31 October 2007

Boys and girls, I would like to share the awesome English lesson about Halloween, death and dying I just did a few hours ago for a class of seven Latvian adults.[More:]

Most of the stuff about Halloween out there for teachers of English to non-native speakers assumes two things: 1) that your students are kids or teens, and 2) that your students would prefer to do something related to the culture of the holiday as it is celebrated in America or Britain. Neither of those two things applied here, so I ran with a much more general idea about death and dying.

I started by giving out this photo of a Dia de los Muertos altar and having students work in small groups first name all the things in the photo, if they could (new words: skull, marigold, lace), and then guess what the significance of the altar was. We eventually got to an idea that it was to commemorate the people featured in the photo at the center-right, who had presumably died. I prompted students to describe what happens when someone dies, and they led me through different rituals for Orthodox and Lutheran/Catholic brands of Christianity as practiced here. This whole stage lasted about 40 minutes.

I then provided a handout on death (if you're a TEFL teacher, it's Unit 1 from this book), which featured two articles about unusual funerals, a section on idiomatic expressions about death ("I would kill for a cigarette", "He bought the farm", "The traffic was murder", etc.), and an activity where students had to choose the correct forms of the verbs "die", "kill", and "murder" in set phrases, like "I'm __________ to meet her!" (answer: dying). The handout also had a question or two about legal procedures for disposing of remains in whatever country the students are from, so we discussed things like shooting one's ashes into space, or whether or not it's OK to bury Grandma in the backyard. This lasted about 30 minutes.

The final part of the lesson, which lasted about an hour, was reading the short Truman Capote story "A Lamp in the Window", from the collection Music for Chameleons, but which I found divided into chunks, with questions for analysis after each section, in Reading 3, (from Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521346733). I won't give away the ending, but it's a fun, short read, and ties in with the ideas we talked about earlier (I can't find the story itself online, but perhaps someone else can?).

A great discussion followed the end of the story: what it's like transitioning from life to death, how people we assume are "dead" are really alive, how we keep each other alive just by being human.

All in all, it was one of the best lessons I've done in my year-and-change of teaching English, and while it seems like all that would have required a lot of forethought and planning, so much of the energy came from the students that I just provided some "signposting" to students know what I expected them to do, and they ran with it. We could have expanded it in so many ways - looking at vocabulary, say, or exploring different tenses used to recount past events - but I'm really happy with what they did get through, especially given the fact that they confronted an authentic text written for native speakers that they'd never seen before, which is a challenge for the best students of any language.

The final mark of success: no one left all the handouts on the table at the end of class, which can happen when students aren't interested enough to wait until the end of the lesson to pack their bags. Today they were enraptured with the story, with each other, and with the language until the very end. Yay!

And Happy Halloween!
Great, great story. My wife is a history teacher, and I very much enjoy her stories of times when she really breaks through with her students. Sounds like you had such a lesson. This is why I love education (the process, not the end result, if you know what I mean), even though I myself would make lousy teacher.
posted by Doohickie 31 October | 21:41
What a great story! That's cool that you did something on Dia de Muertos. I'm here in Mexico and also actually had a really good Halloween lesson today, though mine was more explicitly about Halloween. We looked at the song "Are you happy now?" by Richard Shindell and first did a listening/arranging-the-cut-up-lyrics activity, but then we focused on the story. By the end, the students wanted to know the name of the guy that the girlfriend leaves Richard for. I think they wanted to beat him up! It is really satisfying when they get emotionally involved in the lesson.

Also, what you were saying about just providing the signposts. I completely agree. I was just thinking about this the other week, actually, about how my job is most like a Web 2.0 developer. I create a context and give my users some simple tools, then I sit back and watch what they create with it while offering mild moderation here and there when needed. If only I had Ajax and round-cornered, pastel buttons in my classroom!

Anyway, congrats on the successful lesson. It's harder to do than it looks, and that sounds like a great one. I might even borrow it from you! (if that's okay...)
posted by mosessis 31 October | 22:33
Mosessis: that's why I provided the links! And thanks for the pats-on-the-back, guys!
posted by mdonley 01 November | 02:50
Oh, and this lesson was for Council of Europe Framework level B2 (what we call "upper-intermediate"). Their normal textbook is New Cutting Edge Upper-Intermediate.
posted by mdonley 01 November | 02:53
Those both sound like fun and informative classes. Good work, teachers!
posted by Atom Eyes 01 November | 09:50
The Misfits - "Halloween" (live) || Help me suck up to my boss!

HOME  ||   REGISTER  ||   LOGIN