"人類語言到底是怎麼開始的??"
這問題橫跨了生物、人類、考古、社會、心理、語言、民族學等等學科的範疇。這也是我在這裡的研究所處理的問題之一。身為基督徒，我相信上帝創造人類的獨特性。人不是猴子變來的，但是光是去思考為何我們能生為人H. Sapiens，就算從一個接受進化論基礎的角度來看，也是夠複雜的了。如果現在的人類是進化來的，那從什麼時候開始，人除了肢体表情動作以外，開始使用語言? 又是怎麼樣的因素使黑猩猩們到現在還是黑猩猩(註:人和黑猩猩有98%基因相似)? 像Kanzi之類在實驗室長大的黑猩猩(Bonobo)，如果真的承認他們有使用抽象符號思考溝通的能力，這對人類語言(也是種抽象符號)又有什麼啟示?
Saturday, May 21, 2005
times when students couldn't understand...
Part A
This lessen was about using present and past participles such as “boring” and “bored” as adjectives to describe feeling and things. Before the teaching, both Christine and my mentor teacher, Martha had anticipated that students would have problem with the “-ing” form taking a human subject (e.g. “The guy is interesting”).
I started the lessen by showing students pictures of different activities, and then asked them to describe the activity and the feelings of people in the pictures. With this part, I only wanted them to use those –ed/-ing type of adjectives, so I posted 7 pairs of –ed/-ing adjectives (which I had already written on index cards) on the board, and told them to pick an appropriate one from the list.
Students started giving me sentence such as “The roller coaster ride is exciting”, “The woman is interested in the cosmetics”, etc. Then I asked them, “what rules can you see from these sentences?” and I built up the grammar rules from their answers. It’s clear for them to see that activities take “-ing” form, and humans take “-ed” form. But then while I was building the grammar rule on the board, I realized, “oh, crap, students don’t have this grammar knowledge at all, therefore they won’t be able to give me a sentence like ‘the kids are annoying’. How can I introduce the “-ing” form for human subjects?”
So I went back to the pictures, and introduced the sentence with human subjects in “-ing” form. The next 15 minutes I let them play a game deciding which form they should use. More questions came up, and I saw question marks floating on their heads. They got confused with the present progressive and passive voice, which also have the form of present/past participles. Time went by quickly, and I couldn’t even finish the game that I prepared.
Part B
After doing troubleshooting with Christine, I prepared the whole lessen again the next week. We figured out the confusions they had with this grammar point. I came back with beautifully typed up power point. I thought through the steps to bring them back to the grammar points, and to re-clarify the difference between the adjective and verb forms. During the exercise, some students stuck at deciding the sentence “His supervisor is an amazing/amazed boss”. I explained the question by asking them, “are we talking about his supervisor’s feeling or our opinion?” But some of them just hadn’t got the point. In the end Martha jumped in to help me explain the whole concept again. I didn’t even remember how it ended that way…I really appreciate her tho. She always let me try my best, and when I couldn’t handle it, she would come to my rescue. Because we spent too much time dealing with students’ questions, I had to modify my lessen, so that we could move on to next activity that Martha already scheduled.
After my teaching, Martha gave me feedback and told me that she thought my grammar points were extremely clear to her. “They just need more practice to get it,” she told me. I guess I was kinda disappointed after the teaching. When Martha asked me if I wanted to give them more exercise on the same lessen, I told her I wanted to try something else (anything but grammar…=p). Don’t worry, I am totally over it now. After Friday’s class sharing with people my unsuccessful experience and listening to people’s teaching stories, I feel I can start again now. It’s such a great thing to be a student teacher because we are allowed to make mistakes and to not be perfect.
(originally posted on C218 discussion board)
This lessen was about using present and past participles such as “boring” and “bored” as adjectives to describe feeling and things. Before the teaching, both Christine and my mentor teacher, Martha had anticipated that students would have problem with the “-ing” form taking a human subject (e.g. “The guy is interesting”).
I started the lessen by showing students pictures of different activities, and then asked them to describe the activity and the feelings of people in the pictures. With this part, I only wanted them to use those –ed/-ing type of adjectives, so I posted 7 pairs of –ed/-ing adjectives (which I had already written on index cards) on the board, and told them to pick an appropriate one from the list.
Students started giving me sentence such as “The roller coaster ride is exciting”, “The woman is interested in the cosmetics”, etc. Then I asked them, “what rules can you see from these sentences?” and I built up the grammar rules from their answers. It’s clear for them to see that activities take “-ing” form, and humans take “-ed” form. But then while I was building the grammar rule on the board, I realized, “oh, crap, students don’t have this grammar knowledge at all, therefore they won’t be able to give me a sentence like ‘the kids are annoying’. How can I introduce the “-ing” form for human subjects?”
So I went back to the pictures, and introduced the sentence with human subjects in “-ing” form. The next 15 minutes I let them play a game deciding which form they should use. More questions came up, and I saw question marks floating on their heads. They got confused with the present progressive and passive voice, which also have the form of present/past participles. Time went by quickly, and I couldn’t even finish the game that I prepared.
Part B
After doing troubleshooting with Christine, I prepared the whole lessen again the next week. We figured out the confusions they had with this grammar point. I came back with beautifully typed up power point. I thought through the steps to bring them back to the grammar points, and to re-clarify the difference between the adjective and verb forms. During the exercise, some students stuck at deciding the sentence “His supervisor is an amazing/amazed boss”. I explained the question by asking them, “are we talking about his supervisor’s feeling or our opinion?” But some of them just hadn’t got the point. In the end Martha jumped in to help me explain the whole concept again. I didn’t even remember how it ended that way…I really appreciate her tho. She always let me try my best, and when I couldn’t handle it, she would come to my rescue. Because we spent too much time dealing with students’ questions, I had to modify my lessen, so that we could move on to next activity that Martha already scheduled.
After my teaching, Martha gave me feedback and told me that she thought my grammar points were extremely clear to her. “They just need more practice to get it,” she told me. I guess I was kinda disappointed after the teaching. When Martha asked me if I wanted to give them more exercise on the same lessen, I told her I wanted to try something else (anything but grammar…=p). Don’t worry, I am totally over it now. After Friday’s class sharing with people my unsuccessful experience and listening to people’s teaching stories, I feel I can start again now. It’s such a great thing to be a student teacher because we are allowed to make mistakes and to not be perfect.
(originally posted on C218 discussion board)
My first teaching experience at Culver City Adult
This Thursday I taught my first lessen at Culver City Adult School. Although it’s not my first time teaching in front of a class, I still got nervous even the night before. Since students usually are not very on time, Martha led a small information gap activity for the first 40 minutes, so that I could start my lessen when everyone’s there.
The exercise was about “past perfect and simple past”, which was adopted from their textbook. The point is to let students get a feeling of figuring out what happened first in two given past events. In order to emphasize my point, I drew a timeline on the board, telling them about a story of an Indian guy coming to America, being separated from his wife in India, to look for jobs. (I found some random picture of an Indian couple online…just to make my story more believable… =p). On the way of telling the story, I stick the strips of different events on his timeline. After that, I started pulling two random events from his time line, and asked them to make sentence using “Before/After/Because…”
I guess my intro story got their attention. They all looked up at me, waiting to see what I was gonna do next, which made me even more nervous. I was glad that I got my verb phrases all written on the flash cards, which saved a lot of time. . I could just pull them out to make combinations (e.g. moved to Houston, quit his job…etc.). My handwriting was so messy, my hand was shaking, and it felt like forever for me to finish writing a sentence. I also thought ahead all the possible combinations that I wanted to give them, since I am not a person who can talk or make up sentences on my feet. However, I still looked very busy on the stage, coz the magnet kept falling from the white board, and I had to adjust them back while I was talking…
I made a mistake showing them the past form of “quit”. I asked them the three forms of “quit”, then one student gave me “quited”. The first thought told me it’s wrong, but I got confused while I was writing “quit, quited, quit”. When I realized, I crossed down the “ed” and told them, “see, this is treaky, remember not to put ed here.”
I didn’t know using overhead as an aid takes skills until Martha reminded me. When I was using them, I totally forgot to look back and see if the slides lined up from students’ perspective. I guess most of the time they were tilting their heads to read my slides. (I hoped their necks were alright the next day). Also, I should have let the slides stay longer before I moved onto next lines. Martha suggested me that I go to the back of the classroom to check my own writing on the board (when students are doing their exercises), so that I could see from their perspective and check my own spelling mistakes on the board.
It seemed that my time pacing was alright. I got full 45 minutes and I finished all the planned activities in time. After I finished the lessen, couple of them came up to me and said, “good job!” One student told me that she could tell I was nervous at the beginning. “But you felt more comfortable in the end,” she said. I didn’t expect to have students encouraging me for my first teaching. But it felt good! Now from my retrospect, I did have a good time in my first lessen.
(Ori. posted on 218 Practicum discussion board)
The exercise was about “past perfect and simple past”, which was adopted from their textbook. The point is to let students get a feeling of figuring out what happened first in two given past events. In order to emphasize my point, I drew a timeline on the board, telling them about a story of an Indian guy coming to America, being separated from his wife in India, to look for jobs. (I found some random picture of an Indian couple online…just to make my story more believable… =p). On the way of telling the story, I stick the strips of different events on his timeline. After that, I started pulling two random events from his time line, and asked them to make sentence using “Before/After/Because…”
I guess my intro story got their attention. They all looked up at me, waiting to see what I was gonna do next, which made me even more nervous. I was glad that I got my verb phrases all written on the flash cards, which saved a lot of time. . I could just pull them out to make combinations (e.g. moved to Houston, quit his job…etc.). My handwriting was so messy, my hand was shaking, and it felt like forever for me to finish writing a sentence. I also thought ahead all the possible combinations that I wanted to give them, since I am not a person who can talk or make up sentences on my feet. However, I still looked very busy on the stage, coz the magnet kept falling from the white board, and I had to adjust them back while I was talking…
I made a mistake showing them the past form of “quit”. I asked them the three forms of “quit”, then one student gave me “quited”. The first thought told me it’s wrong, but I got confused while I was writing “quit, quited, quit”. When I realized, I crossed down the “ed” and told them, “see, this is treaky, remember not to put ed here.”
I didn’t know using overhead as an aid takes skills until Martha reminded me. When I was using them, I totally forgot to look back and see if the slides lined up from students’ perspective. I guess most of the time they were tilting their heads to read my slides. (I hoped their necks were alright the next day). Also, I should have let the slides stay longer before I moved onto next lines. Martha suggested me that I go to the back of the classroom to check my own writing on the board (when students are doing their exercises), so that I could see from their perspective and check my own spelling mistakes on the board.
It seemed that my time pacing was alright. I got full 45 minutes and I finished all the planned activities in time. After I finished the lessen, couple of them came up to me and said, “good job!” One student told me that she could tell I was nervous at the beginning. “But you felt more comfortable in the end,” she said. I didn’t expect to have students encouraging me for my first teaching. But it felt good! Now from my retrospect, I did have a good time in my first lessen.
(Ori. posted on 218 Practicum discussion board)
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