Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Follow up after Greece
As so many of the students in Greece seemed to already be a part of Facebook it seemed only logical to create a community there for them to join. This we have now done and it is called...
Back home after Greece
We are now home again after our visit to Thessaloniki.
The visit has been a great success both for the project and also personally for the students.
With respect to the project we have seen that the work we have been doing in preparation for this visit has reaped its reward. There has been a very high level of preparation, most of the other countries more so than us. Many of them had prepared the activies with presentations done on powerpoint. There also had prepared dances and other things. The planned activities went very well and the objectives, which basically can be summed up as getting the students to relate to each other, have been achieved.
In the run up to the visit my own students had batxillerat exams for the end of the term. Many of them were trying to complete their normal exams plus to pass exams they had failed earlier in the term. All this meant that they had little time for preparation for the visit and some of the project activities they did not prepare before we left. Really though they had no excuses for not having pr went well and theepared something as these things, such as the school system in Catalunya and common and unusual interests, I had asked them to prepare weeks ago. That they didn't was largely their own fault and in fact I had already told them that they would be on their own in this sense. This was exactly how it turned out. On the days of the project activities I only accompanied them on the first part, the word bank. This we had prepared and made a video about so it went very well. When it came to other activities I either chose not to accompany them or I was in a teacher's meeting anyway and they had to get by on their own. Their initial nervousness meant that they were all cursing me roundly but in the end towards the end of the week we saw that they were all able to get by their lack of preparation through their own inventiveness and in fact they were coming up to me after the last activity about school systems saying that they had used the video of the school we put on our page and had done the rest off the cuff but that their presentation "had been the best one."
So in the end the whole thing went very well and they didn't "let the side down" at all.
On a personal level for the students once they got over their original shyness the week was a tremendously positive experience for them. All of them made great friends from among the other countries. Some of them inevitably getting "girlfriends" over the course of the week. All of them were speaking English by the end of the week, better or worse but at least communicating with the other students in a way which I am sure none of them imagined they would have been doing at the start of the week.
To give two examples, Francesc, who certainly has the best level of English out of the students I took, found that on the secong trip we did to Vergina he was actually able to understand and talk to the Greek guide we had. At the other end of the spectrum, Mayte (whose Enlgish is not at all good) was very proficient in learning phrases in Greek and also started to construct basic sentences in English. Abraham, whose Enlglish is equally limited, in the first project activity was seated opposite two Swedish girls and unable to say anything at all. When I went to talk to him they were both listening to the conversations on either side of him and ignorning him completely. I asked him why and he said, "I can't say anything, nothing at all." At the end of the week he was speaking basic English and had even managed to get a Cypriot girlfriend.
Apart from the levels of English I was also very happy with the way in which the week affected all of my students in some way. On the last day there wasn't a dry eye among them. Then in the bus on the way to the airport at 2am there were more tears and most of them insisted I arrange it so that they can go to Germany in November.
The visit has been a great success both for the project and also personally for the students.
With respect to the project we have seen that the work we have been doing in preparation for this visit has reaped its reward. There has been a very high level of preparation, most of the other countries more so than us. Many of them had prepared the activies with presentations done on powerpoint. There also had prepared dances and other things. The planned activities went very well and the objectives, which basically can be summed up as getting the students to relate to each other, have been achieved.
In the run up to the visit my own students had batxillerat exams for the end of the term. Many of them were trying to complete their normal exams plus to pass exams they had failed earlier in the term. All this meant that they had little time for preparation for the visit and some of the project activities they did not prepare before we left. Really though they had no excuses for not having pr went well and theepared something as these things, such as the school system in Catalunya and common and unusual interests, I had asked them to prepare weeks ago. That they didn't was largely their own fault and in fact I had already told them that they would be on their own in this sense. This was exactly how it turned out. On the days of the project activities I only accompanied them on the first part, the word bank. This we had prepared and made a video about so it went very well. When it came to other activities I either chose not to accompany them or I was in a teacher's meeting anyway and they had to get by on their own. Their initial nervousness meant that they were all cursing me roundly but in the end towards the end of the week we saw that they were all able to get by their lack of preparation through their own inventiveness and in fact they were coming up to me after the last activity about school systems saying that they had used the video of the school we put on our page and had done the rest off the cuff but that their presentation "had been the best one."
So in the end the whole thing went very well and they didn't "let the side down" at all.
On a personal level for the students once they got over their original shyness the week was a tremendously positive experience for them. All of them made great friends from among the other countries. Some of them inevitably getting "girlfriends" over the course of the week. All of them were speaking English by the end of the week, better or worse but at least communicating with the other students in a way which I am sure none of them imagined they would have been doing at the start of the week.
To give two examples, Francesc, who certainly has the best level of English out of the students I took, found that on the secong trip we did to Vergina he was actually able to understand and talk to the Greek guide we had. At the other end of the spectrum, Mayte (whose Enlgish is not at all good) was very proficient in learning phrases in Greek and also started to construct basic sentences in English. Abraham, whose Enlglish is equally limited, in the first project activity was seated opposite two Swedish girls and unable to say anything at all. When I went to talk to him they were both listening to the conversations on either side of him and ignorning him completely. I asked him why and he said, "I can't say anything, nothing at all." At the end of the week he was speaking basic English and had even managed to get a Cypriot girlfriend.
Apart from the levels of English I was also very happy with the way in which the week affected all of my students in some way. On the last day there wasn't a dry eye among them. Then in the bus on the way to the airport at 2am there were more tears and most of them insisted I arrange it so that they can go to Germany in November.
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