Fri Feb 27

Objectives for today:

- Identify gerunds and infinitives in a written text

- Create a dialogue in a written text, including gerunds and infinitives

- Identify basic movie conventions, and begin watching Stardust (without subtitles)

Although the journal writing for today was to listen to African music and write their thoughts as they listened, it took a while to set up the Play Station equipment in order to watch the DVD, so I skipped the writing task today.

We went straight to looking at the homework (final exercise on infinitives), and then in groups of three I gave out one page each of the comic strip to each group. They had to read the strips and identify the gerunds and infinitives in them. It seemed like simple and hopefully fun exercise, and in the end they identified a good number of the grammar points; but they got more stuck on the unknown vocabulary of the strips, which I hadn't counted on -  words like preposterous, web-slinging wacko, whining, in cahoots, criminal underbelly, luring - and which distracted them. So by the time they finished the exercise (which took longer than expected) I wasn't prepared to get them to do the "invent the dialogue" exercise as well.

Unfortunately knowing that you're going to watch a DVD at some point in the class (please, please, no more exercises, we want to watch the movie!!!) is a distraction. I had planned to show at least 40 minutes of the movie in order to ensure that we would finish watching it in one more session. So as we went through some common movie conventions, I could see the sts' minds ticking away and my own watch-hands moving forward, the need becoming greater and greater.

So we watched the movie. I stopped it a few times. Mental note: putting the DVD through the VCR and into the TV brings down the volume quite notably. Also, not putting on subtitles for the first part ensures that your sts don't understand what is going on quite as much because they're not used to the accents and are still trying to establish characters and plot.