Korean Job Discussion Forums

[maddog]

I'm teaching 'Green Eggs and Ham' to one of my classes. I think it's way to easy for them, so I suggested to my boss that I fly through. There's not much to discuss. She said it WOULD take at least two weeks cos they have to MEMORIZE the book.

What exactly is memorizing a book meant to achieve?

MD

[kat2]

Nothing.

They want the kids to be able to repeat it for hte parents probably. Being able to repeat=real learning here.

I think it falls into the category of "eat the page=learn the page." I still have some students who say taht they eat paper sometime to learn it.

I would just say, yeah whatever director. Make your kids memorize it, but try to make it fun. Don't try to understand it, just try to pick your battles.

[Son Deureo!]

Ahhh, the memorizing a storybook "method". I remember when all I got to teach my students was a 20 line dialogue, and I had to teach it every day for a month. It took me four months to get the wonjang to stop using the cheapest books on the market and get something that actually taught them something more than how to be parrots.

In the meantime, if you have to make them memorize it, you could have them learn to act it out as a play.

[spyro25]

Memorization is perhaps not what YOUR end goal should be. Your students need to acquire and internalize the language in the book, so that the language in the book can be used in other tasks. If they can turn the language in the book into meaningful output in other contexts / situations then this would be the real 'value' of the task you have been assigned. role playing the story in the book is one idea but you should try to take elements from the book (structure, phrases, rhyming schemes) and fit them into tasks not related to the story as well, perhaps getting the students to create a similar story using their own experiences, using the vocabulary and structures in the book, would be a valuable exercise.

just as a funny example, we had a play at our kindergarten a while back, and now the students use the language they had learned for that play wherever they feel it fits a new context. one of the students now says 'yes, my king' to every command i give him, and others say 'all stand to hail the teacher' (when the original line was all stand to hail the king and queen). they can even use whole conversations from the play in different contexts to the original fantasy story. the important thing was that they had internalized the structures of a seemingly boring play and were free to use them again at any time and situation.

[oneofthesarahs]

My kids are working on an Aladdin play, and they also like to throw in language they've learned here and there during normal class. One third grader shook his head at me sadly one day and said, "If I had a magic lamp, I'd wish that I never had to homework again."

We were practicing letter-writing in another class, and I had the class pretend they were on vacation and write letters back home. One of my kids wrote about how he was on vacation in Agrabah with Aladdin...although that letter later talked about how they got hungry and ate Abu.
My students are weird.