Miso Happy!

Don't get me wrong. I love my students. The students I'm teaching now are overall the best students that I've ever taught - motivated and energetic with great attitudes to boot. I cherish the freedom I have to create lesson plans that engage them and suit their levels. What I don't appreciate are some of the practices of the company I work for. I work for a private company in Japan that contracts out English programs (curricula, teachers, the whole kit and caboodle) to universities. Universities do this to save money on direct hires of English instructors. On a personal level, I've had no issues with the individual staff members I have dealt with, but I've a lot of issues with how things are done - especially the inconsistencies. One inconsistency is based around the curricula. The curricula are cobbled together and the curriculum from one course for one set of students is often carried over almost verbatim to other courses despite the students' levels a...

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been really enjoying teaching the group of students I have this semester. They are motivated and energetic, and I rarely have to pull teeth to get the students participating in speaking activities (with the exception of a couple of isolated incidents). As such, I've been gradually introducing critical thinking elements into classroom activities. At this point, I'm defining critical thinking as the questioning of one's assumptions in order to evaluate perspectives and worldviews from a broader perspective. However, I would say that as the semester has gone on, I've only just edged into the first part of that definition: the questioning of one's own assumptions . I wouldn't say most of the activities I've introduced have been focused on critical thinking, and I'm not teaching it explicitly. I do think many of my fluency activities have subtlely introduced basic elements of critical thinking: asking for opinions,...