In the pipeline

Dear All,

My Business English course starts tomorrow night. I have to admit that I am very excited about seeing my (new) students and telling them about the activities they will be involved in. I am confident that there is a sound balance between how I am going to start the course this time and how I would 'normally' do it, so the whole thing should not be too overwhelming.

Over the last few weeks, ever since Deborah and Sandra set us reflecting on spotting the room for improvement in our class, I have been going back to the previous years that my course had been run. The formulation 'this should be something new, something you have not been using so far' yet, evidently, something that can be set up in a couple of weeks and performed in only two of them forced me to think in very concrete terms. It is amazing how close deadlines can prevent us from getting carried away!

The combination of the existing resource (wiki) and a new one (social network, already has three members!) will hopefully prove an appealing, constructive and, most importantly, useful mix for the students. What needed figuring out was how to integrate the two. It took me some time to formulate the tasks that would be comprehensible to students – they are posted in the network Forum. I also wrote 8 questions students need to fill in at signup – their language learning profiles. The network, of course, needed setting up and customizing a little. After a crash course on social networking, I have a social network profile – what a wonderful experience. I have spotted another one on the Web already that I would like to join.

The course wiki took searching so that I would come up with topics that are searchable. I took care to prepare sample answers to questions and a sample article. Of course, this much handholding for the students (and myself, coming form my colleagues) may not be necessary in future, but right now I want to be sure they know what I would like them to do.

The feedback I have received so far from my colleague who has been helping me with implementing the network and my student assistant has been very positive, so that's what keeps me going. Besides, it is only now that I see how immensely useful the experience of being on our discussion forum and blog is – even more so considering this is the first time I have intensely participated in any such service. While expecting my students to do similar tasks, I have my own experience to rely on. I am a cat lover, yet have to subscribe to Mark Twain’s words, ‘If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.’ (May all the cat lovers among you forgive me, as it is a figure of speech anyway.)

Of course, the objective – emotions aside – is to provide the students with activities that would make them familiar with the course syllabus and with each other and do some reading, writing and speaking while doing so. I never thought you could do this in one go. So let's wait and see.

The preparations have also kept me from actively participating in other E-teacher assignments, so I'll commit myself to it as of tomorrow. I was thinking about learning / learner styles as I was cutting out some questions for my students tonight, thinking what difference it would make to have the questions scattered on the desk rather than listed in a neat predefined order. So my lesson outline is coming up!

I hope everyone else has started carrying out their plans successfully. I will keep in touch. We are in this together, so I am trying to imagine every one of us finding their way through the classes that took so much meditation, mediation and imagination as well as the hard skills to prepare. Owing to this, it has to be a week to remember, as some of this week's blog posts seem to suggest.

Best regards,

Andreja