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Teaching & Learning: Week 6

                                  A blog is a great way to keep track of the work we do. I have really enjoyed keeping a record of my work this way and I want to start a blog as a project as soon as I finish my courses. I have already begun to use a Padlet website for something I call "5 Minute Grammar" and I want to work on this so it is user-friendly and helpful for English language learners. Blogging is also in line with part of my learning philosophy, which is to create things and especially to create things with the content we need to learn. Utsunomiya University Monday, October 3: I taught three 90-minute classes: Integrated English IIB (x2), and Advanced English EAP Arts & Sciences.  I really enjoyed my first two days back at this school and I also feel that I have taken a step forward in my teaching, especially in the last month or so. I prepared fairly we...

Teaching, Learning, Adjusting: Week 3

       This past week I spent time preparing lessons and teaching. On Tuesday, September 13, I prepared a lesson and taught my private adult class. On Wednesday, September 14, I taught my first lesson in a new class. On Friday, September 16th, I taught my first two classes at Teikyo University for the fall semester. I also ended this week teaching private lessons at a day-long high school AP program at Utsunomiya University. Every few months I am involved in this pre-college program for high school students. This is called I-PU and I have included a link (Japanese only,  I cannot find an English version, unfortunately). For this week's blog, I will mainly list events and summarize happenings.  Ben's Class / Tuesday, 9/13 Our Classroom. Next week, I hope to bring in some examples of work from this adult class. We went through a PowerPoint pdf of adjectives ending in -ing / -ed   and discussed examples and we engaged in a pass-around activity by having h...

Teaching, Learning, Adjusting: Week 1

Today's post begins a seven-week cycle of blog posts that are devoted to my teaching and practicum at the University of Southern Maine.  I teach in a variety of settings in Utsunomiya, Japan, and this week, I am excited to begin this blog series by sharing a bit about my brand-new EFL class I just started. I will also share a new syllabus and a new class activity for oral speaking practice I will use this semester at Teikyo University. In a way, the theme for this week could be: Creating. I want to harness the power of the creative process and in both my new class and Teikyo classes I hope to do this. Posting about this actually helps develop the ideas and outside comments are welcome! Recently, I have been thinking about the usefulness and practicality of learning a language through creating things (presentations, short videos, audio podcasts, a pamphlet, a brochure, or an advertisement for example) the list is pretty much endless. My experience as a professional musician has defi...