Teacher Discussion Forums

Around the middle of November (say 11/14 or 11/17) I'm going to be doing a death penalty discussion class. As part of the class, students will be posting messages on the death penalty forum of my site: http://www.eslgo.com/forum/deathp/index.cgi

The lesson plan I'll be using is here: http://www.eslgo.com/resources/lesson_p ... _lady.html

If anyone else is planning to do the same topic, we could have our students talking back and forth on the message board, which would be fantastic. My students are college freshmen in Puchon Korea. Anyone interested?

My students posts are going up: http://www.eslgo.com/forum/deathp/index.cgi

If anyone can get their students to respond, that would be great.

I'll pass the URL on to my students, James.

We haven't discussed the Death Penalty in particular, but we've talked about crime and gun-ownership in the USA after quite a number of them had watched "Bowling for Columbine".

I hope they'll come up with something. They're not really confident when it comes to posting on the internet, though, but I hope I'll be able to motivate them.

You can see my students posts on the message board already. They are about a semester old now, but hopefully some of them might see the replies.

James Trotta
www.eslgo.com
www.eslgo.net

Yes - an impressive website you've got there, Jim.

Looks as if you spend hours and hours on it, and it's pretty amazing how readily your students take to it.

With mine, I always feel as if it's a matter of coaxing and persuading them relentlessly, and even then they shy away from these experiences.

Yes, and they don't get all that much online-time.

Korea is a wired country. Every college student has internet access and can use the web pretty easily. I did have one student who was afraid to post because people might see his mistakes, but generally students have no problem using my site. And yes, I do spend hours on it.

I don't know if it's just the internet, though...

I had my students respond to a list of death-penalty related statements, and *terse* is a mild adjective to describe the statements I got. For example, I used

The death penalty is a deterrant to criminals.

as a prompt, and they answered:

Yes. Nobody wants to die.

Along these lines, all of them. I felt like tearing their hair out. I would be embarassed to see these kind of sad testemonials to their close-to-brain-dead-state-of-mind on the internet.

What a bunch of wallies, really.

You can see on the message boards that I didn't get a lot more than that, but I did get something. I used this lesson plan: http://www.eslgo.com/resources/lesson_p ... _lady.html

You'll need the song "Iron Lady" by Phil Ochs to use it, but I've found it worthwhile for sparking discussion on the death penalty. If you get the version on "What's that I hear now? the songs of Phil Ochs" it's really good music too. The original version is so so.

Thanks.

Looks like good music, thoughtful and all that....maybe I'll get a copy.

What a well-thought out lesson plan!

You know, it really depends on what time of the day it is, and on what happened before the lesson, and on what's going to happen after, and on the temperature, and on the weather.... on some days, lesson plans don't work at all for me, because their involvement is zero, and I feel "what a shame about the work I've put in" and end up doing teacher-directed, uncommunicative translation exercises interspersed with a lot of *beep* about their failure to study vocabulary, and then, miraculously, they end up enjoying these structured kind of lessons.

I find that my students appreciate some structure too. They like knowing exactly what I want them to do. The best communicative activities involve some planning time or you may find learners at a loss for words. Perhaps your learners need more planning time than they get?

Some of them probably do.

Most, however, prefer to do things spontaneously, and have made it a habit to say anything that's on their mind without worrying too much about whether it's correct or not - maybe this is also a consequence of me being not really harsh on them when they make mistakes. They've internalized the "as long as you get the message across, everything else is of secondary importance"- message allright, maybe more than I'd have liked them to.

If they had extra time on their hands, they'd use it to key messages into their cell-phones, to distort images on their laptop or to run finger-skateboards up and down their desks. Sitting down and working conscientiously seems to be culturally alien to them - the only way I can get them to do it is to be ultra-structured in my approach, and being brutally frank about the consequences.

Anything *too* communicative smacks of game-playing to them, and brings on a fun-and-games attitude in a jiffy. I mean they *love* school, and it's kind of exhilerating to co-operate with people bristling with life and full of joi-de-vivre, but sometimes I think work is not progressing at quite the rate I would like to see it progress.

But that's probably less of a problem where you are at, isn't it? From the responses on the death-penality message-board they seem quite a serious bunch.....

Well it is a serious topic. When I do my taxi court role-play (as I did today) things are much different. http://www.eslgo.com/resources/sa/taxico.html

Oh, I'm sure they are!

What a great idea.

The mind boggles at what *my bunch* would come up with if I tried it... they wouldn't just have them stop at kissing, you see, they'd go into saucier stuff just like that.

I've got to try it some time, though. It raises interesting issues. Thanks for pointing it out to me!