3rd Russian lesson - circuit exercise

I have now completed about ¼ of my teaching practice. It was a double lesson, and I was substituting the Russian teacher for real, because she had a planning meeting of the staff, plus she was sick. I had gotten some positive feedback from the students and the guiding teacher, so I was excited to try out even new things. I probably had high ambitions to have an educational, interactive, and fun lesson.

The preparation took about 3 hours. Teaching in class is very hard work, and I have already noticed that if one wants to have something extra on the class, the preparation takes irrationally long time. If I would teach 25 hours per week, I would not have enough time to prepare for all the lessons! Now preparation takes at least as long as the actual class.

I had a wonderful, creative idea for this lesson. I would organize the desks and chairs in 4-5 islands. Each area would have a different topic, and the students would rotate from one task to the next, as if in the circuit training. One station would be “pronunciation clinic”, where the students would read the chapter out loud in Russian and I would correct and help with the pronunciation. The other stations would be a bank, a café, a shop, and a tourist agency. The students would have different tasks relating to each station.

Implementation

I asked a friend of mine to lend me Monopoly game money to be used in the “Bank”. I made written signs for all the stations in Russian, and the instructions. I arrived in the classroom 40 minutes before the beginning of the lesson to arrange the desks and chairs in 5 stations. I checked that the overhead projector was working.

The lesson

The students normally arrive early, some even 30 minutes before the lesson. Today they showed up only 10 minutes before. I learned that they had had an Improbatur orienteering, hunting stamps from the bars according to drinks, so out of 22 students, 9 were missing, most because of hangover, but maybe some because of the flu epidemic, too. As for me, it is easier to teach a bit smaller group, so I didn’t mind.

Today’s topics were Numbers and Noun/Adjective Plural Forms. We learned the numbers 30-100, and repeated 1-30, which the students have already learned. The spelling and stress in the word is complicated, so we took time to repeat them. I had prepared to teach a handout “How much does it cost”, but I learned that it was already covered on the previous lesson. I quickly moved on. We spent quite a lot of time on noun/adjective plural forms, because it was a new item, and will be asked in the exam. I covered the grammar from the text book, and had the students complete an exercise, and I reviewed the grammar from an overhead transparency. We also learned some business vocabulary and two new verbs, ‘idti’ and ‘exat’, indicating going somewhere by foot or by a vehicle. Then it was time for the fun part!

As there were only 13 students, I omitted the Travel Agency section from the island, because more students were needed to fill 5 stations. Also, we did not have time to cover the material related to this, so that will be taught the next time. I asked the students to sit on the bank, café, restaurant, and pronunciation stations, 3 in each, and 1 extra in one table. I explained what they are to be: In the Bank they ask for a certain sum of money. Then the cashier will count the money and write the sum down on a piece of paper, and the client will check if the spelling is correct, and thank the cashier. In restaurant, the students ask a free/taken seat and ask how much different dishes cost. In the shop, they ask if there are food items in plural forms and do the nominated exercises in the study book.

I stayed in the pronunciation clinic. Three students at the time read the chapter 9 and I was listening. I corrected their pronunciation and made them pay attention especially to difficult consonants: sh, shj, ch, z, zh, stressing the words correctly, pronuncing the unstressed vowels (e becomes i and o becomes a), and raising the intonation at the end of the question sentence. Each group of 3 students was very different. The first one was very slow and I corrected them quite a lot, the second one was very quick, the third one very shy, and the fourth one very brave and loud. I felt that the students were nervous when they “had” to read out load and when I was listening, but I purposefully did this exercise in a small group, so that no-one would not be ashamed in front of the whole group. I got the idea for this exercise last week, when I noticed that some students can read and pronounce Russian quite well, and other hardly. This exercise confirmed by observation: few students did not have a very clear idea of the pronunciation, which is difficult for anyone. I know that the students come from several beginner’s groups and they have had 2 different teachers last spring, and I notice this background: some students are a lot more advanced than the others, and I think I can tell which students were taught by which teacher. This is quite amazing, but actually I know some students already from the last spring, when I observed the Russian lessons.

Each group carried out the exercise for 7-8 minutes, and then I asked them to switch places. This was just in time when the students in my table had finished reading the chapter. The whole exercise took about 30 minutes, until the end of the lesson. I asked the students how they felt working in this way, but no-one really said anything. It would be nice to receive some feedback, because I had no idea if this was an effective way of teaching, but for this purpose I will ask them to fill out feedback questionnaires on my last teaching session.

When I got home, I felt extremely exhausted. I wonder if I caught the student’s apprehension, when things were done in a different format, or maybe it was because I was involved in speaking and observing during the whole session. Normally I have the students do pair or group activities while I check what is next in my agenda and arrange my papers.