In preparation for my first lecture, I had to go through a crash course on transformative learning with ATF last Friday. For those of you who are totally clueless, ATF was 2008's ultimate male hang-up.
* Here's a confession: ATF is a prof. He was my prof and thesis mentor during undergrad and my first term of grad school, and will still be my prof (and hopefully thesis mentor again) next term.
It's a bit tricky especially now that we're colleagues, but I promised myself to break free from the shackles of the hang-up for 09. However, in the hour of training we had (fortunatley, G, my great gal pal who is also a prof was there), I'd just like to say that it is unbelievable how he keeps changing my life (Oh I am so hoping that my students would never get a hold of this blog and read this post). The guy is BRILLANT! I don't think I've ever met any guy who comes close to how intellectually stimulating he is. Anyway, enough about him...
As always, I had to wake up at 4:30 am to prepare (as in beauty preparation) for the 8am class. I wore a satin turqoise off-shoulder blouse, black capris, and gold greek-style sandals (nope, not gladiators). I started the class with a quiz (yeah I know, evil right!). Since it's a global studies course, I require the students to log on to the BBC website every Sunday and read two articles. The first would be the main news front page of the day, while the second would be the news front page for Asia-Pacific. I got yesterday 's question from the main page article and my question was "What did the Israeli Defense Forces leave on the Gaza Strip, and what are its contents?" Don't get me wrong, the BBC articles are relatively short, and my maximum sentence requirement is three (so if they are able to hit the mark in one sentence, they are very free to do so), so I'm a bit surprised with how the results turned out.
Only four out of five students got the answer. I was looking for the following keywords: fliers/leaflets/pamphlets and warning. Ironically, the first sentence of the news article reads:
"Israel has dropped leaflets on the Gaza Strip warning residents that it is to escalate its military action." :(
Other answers ranged from telling me how many Palestinians died, what sort of weapons were launched... there was even a student who answered, "The IDF left nothing but destruction." There are all valid answers yes, but they missed the point of the question. I already printed a copy of the article onto a transparency and would discuss this matter with them tomorrow at the beginning of the class.
On the brighter side, I was able to go through the discussion smoothly - they were attentive and quiet (it was also a bit awkward cause one of my classmates during undergrad is now my student), and I had no difficulties controlling the class. They also participated and gave good input, I ended the class showing them a video animation on globalization, which should've presented the concept in a more entertaining and simple manner.
Tomorrow is graded recitati0n day, and I'm looking forward to seeing my class again!:D
