The Summer Semester Begins

TL;DR or Quick Summary 

• This was the first week of the summer semester. I am teaching the same classes/students as last semester, plus new conversation classes. 
• I teach 3 conversation classes, which is the entire 2nd year. At the end of the year, my 2nd year students will have to pass a big practical English exam so I will have some hard numbers to see how I did. 
• Based off of feedback from last semester, I made several changes to my Master's writing class and so far, I think I am liking the changes.
• The weather has started to warm up here. Currently it is a balmy 42F (5.5C) and raining liquid water (not that cold frozen white stuff). Halfway through writing this post, the cold frozen stuff made a vicious return.
• Despite the fact that the semester has just begun, I have a feeling that it is going to start to fly by pretty soon.
• My next few weeks involve a fair amount of travel, which I am both looking forward to and expecting unending exhaustion. 

The days are getting longer, the temperature is rising, and the snow is melting. I can feel spring coming. I can't believe it has already been 5 months since I have been in Białystok and in Poland. There is so much to look forward to this semester and so much to accomplish before it's over. In brief, this semester I am attending a conference in Berlin, leading two education seminars on technology in the classroom, traveling far and wide, teaching three new conversation classes, and trying to get some sleep. 

I don't want to make too many predictions about this semester, because looking back on last semester any predictions ended up being pretty far off. But I do think that I will enjoy my second (and final :( ) semester in Białystok. 

Start of the Summer Semester 

The first week of class is always an unknown, but at least this semester, I had several days to prepare for my classes. Over those few days, I went through tons of different ideas to give my classes more consistency and substance. While I am happy enough with how last semester went, there is a lot of room for improvement this semester. Below I will talk about my individual classes and what I hope to do in them. 

Master's Writing 

My master's writing class is probably the class that causes me the most stress, not that it is any fault of the students, merely their advanced English abilities. Having never taught (or taken) a graduate writing course, sometimes I find myself at a loss of what to teach. Last semester, there were several lessons that were below my students' level; while most students politely completed the lesson anyways, I want everyone to feel like the class is actively benefiting them. #EveryTeacher'sGoal

So after much agonizing (searching the Internet and talking to other Fulbrighters), I decided to shift the focus of the course from small, somewhat unrelated, separate topics in writing to responses to different cultural topics. I hope this shift will allow me to have more cultural exchanges with my students and will be interesting for my students. Ideally, each class will include one area of writing to focus on (vague pronouns, parallelism, specific vocabulary, etc) and one topic on which to write. Students will write smaller pieces that are more focused; hopefully this will allow them to get more feedback from me. 

For the first class, the cultural topic was the usefulness of university in modern society. We watched the Last Week Tonight episode on March Madness and the NCAA. It was not directly related to the topic, but I thought it gave an interesting insight into a big part of American university culture. It discusses the ethics of paying (or rather not paying) college athletes. For the writing aspect of the class, students responded to an opinion piece that listed reasons not to go to college. I asked students to simply write their response to the article using their own experiences at university. 

Nearly all of the student responses mainly agreed with the article. Students argued that many of the classes at university did nothing to prepare them for the real world; some claimed that many young Poles attended college simply because they did not know what they wanted to do after high school. I expected several students to agree with the article, but the vast majority of students seemed to at least partially agree with it. Many mentioned that it was viewed as necessary to hold a degree, but that the degree didn't prepare them for the real world. It was a good opportunity to see what my students really thought about their higher education system 

This week, I am thinking about discussing a recent NPR podcast on college Hook Up Culture. If you are interested, the podcast is only 24 minutes, so it won't take up much of your time and is an interesting listen. I really don't know how my students will respond to it, but I suppose that is the point of discussing the topic. No matter the result, I will certainly update my faithful readers on the result. But for you, my faithless readers, those who read something besides my blog, I cannot promise anything!! 

2nd Year Writing 

I think out of all my classes late semester, I was most satisfied with my second year writing classes. For the most part, my lessons were fairly useful and coherent (although there were one or two that were iffy). In general, I have firmer grasp of what I want to teach this semester. I want to focus on smaller skills (similar to the Master's class) instead of big essay structures. I think that structure has been beaten into them enough through several classes. 

For the first week of classes, I was kind of in a holding pattern; I was not sure how many students were going to show up for the first day of class. Last semester, it was a mixed bag. Most students came on the first day, but several tactically decided to use their two unexcused absences in the first two weeks. I did not want start off with a critically important lesson due to the potential absences. It turned out to be a good decision. My 8:00am class was surprisingly present, but my 1:15 class was about half present. I'm sure attendance will pick up as the semester goes on. 

Last week, the lessons focused on creating effective transitions out of disparate stories (or at least that was the hope). The inspiration for the separate stories came from images cut out of magazines. Overall the lesson was good for the first day of class, but it was not as effective as I was hoping it might be. Buying Polish magazines was a small adventure because the covers were often misleading. I ended up with a unique mix of topics including horror movies, motherhood, politics, and what I think was teen fashion. The cashier gave me a generally confused look while checking out. 

This week, we will discuss the usefulness of higher education, like we did in my master's class. However, the response piece will be different and have different priories. 

Conversation

This semester, my new classes are all second year conversation classes. There are three classes and they meet every other week. I already had 2/3 of the students in my writing class and I had met the other 1/3 through observing my mentor. I hope that it will prove be a good opportunity to have more meaningful conversations and exchanges. 

First of all, if any of my students from my first conversation class read this, I would like to say thank you for all the great advice and suggestions that you gave me during the first class. The suggestions made my later classes more productive!

In each conversation course I asked my students to write down two or three skills they wanted to focus and improve on in the class. I got a variety of responses including job interviews, sports, technology/video games, politics, anything but politics, and international topics. By far the most frequent suggestion was to practice the questions for the end of the year practical English exam. During the speaking portion of the exam, students blindly pick two questions from a pool of 100. They then have 5 minutes to prepare a response for one of them. There are some interesting and sometimes difficult questions on the list. Throughout the semester, I hope to get through most of the questions.

Besides the end of the year exam questions, I also want to discuss cultural and social differences and similarities between the US and Poland. I am not entirely sure which topics will be discussed, but I certainly want to keep it interesting for everyone in the class. 

I will also be continuing my informal conversation class with professors and graduate students. 

Integrated Skills 

The last class to discuss! This semester I want my integrated skills class to be much more coherent and organized than last semester. With a good amount of planning on the front end, I think that the odds are in my favor. My biggest goal this semester is simply to have my students talk more. Last semester, while there was a good amount of student speaking in the class, there could have certainly been more. So, to start off this semester we jumped into light student presentations. 

Using the same topic as my other class, usefulness of higher education, students will present in groups. Keeping topics similar throughout my classes seems like an obvious idea, however it took the advice of another Fulbrighter to make me really question why I wasn't doing it before. Keeping the same topic throughout the week will hopefully decrease my planning stress and let me focus on customizing the lesson for each class. 

Anyways, this week students will give a short presentation on the topics. Before their presentation, I hope to go over some useful phrases and presentation strategies. We will see how it goes. 

That's All Folks!

This was probably one of the duller blog posts (no angry camels in the post), but it was definitely nice to type out my expectations and hopes for the semester. Many of my university colleagues have asked me how the start of my semester is going and so far it's going fairly well. I do not have nearly as much to adapt to as last semester. For the most part, I am aware of how the system works here (although there are still several things I am still trying to figure out). 

March looks pretty busy for me, both in teaching and in travel. I will be taking a weekend trip to the south of Poland to do some skiing. It has probably been at least ten years since I have last skied, so we will see how it goes! As I mentioned earlier, I will also be leading an education seminar on using technology in the classroom. A lot of what I want to talk about is how to effectively use Google Docs and Google Slides in high school lessons. I have some good idea for what I want to discuss in the presentation and a couple of weeks to finalize it. The conference in Berlin is hosted by Fulbright Germany and is mandatory for German Fulbrighters. The German commission also invites several people from other European countries and I was selected as one of the Polish representatives. 

As always, thanks for reading!