Correcting work

At some point your desk turns into a war zone with piles of marked and unmarked papers. If you do the digital thing, you have a slew of unread emails with (and occasionally without) attachments in your inbox or a virtual pile on whatever digital blackboard system your school uses. How to attack this task? I think you need to consider a few issues to determine the extent of your correcting.

Britain vs. America game

So, how to discuss the differences between British (BrE) and American English (AmE)? Some of them are simple spelling issues like -ise/ize, -re/er, or -our/or, but there are vocabulary differences as well. These usually come in the form of lists to memorize: boring!

Instead of going over the list in the book, I decided to make a game out of it.

Practicing presentation skills

Students have been on the receiving end of presentations, good and bad ones, for a long time during their years of schooling. My students, in the field of International Business and Languages (IBL), give plenty of presentations, but it never hurts to do a more specific course. As presentation practice in their first or second week of class, I asked them to give the worst possible presentation.

Doing introductions

As this is my first post on this blog, it is only fitting that the main thing I did in my first week was introductions. Obviously, there are many ways to break the ice, but I didn't want to create too much of a game atmosphere just yet, so I decided to do the following.