Progress test day!

Today is Progress test day; this is the last week for some students on their level or the half-way point for others. I only have half-way students, after this week is over it will be Christmas break then when they return the students will have a new teacher. If it was a native teacher now like with my classes they will go to a local teacher for the last half or vice-versa.

At the moment I am sat in Paris, no not the city in France unfortunately but a classroom called Paris. All our classes are given names of different cities, before we had an extension the 1^st floor was named after British cities like London, Manchester, Oxford etc and the 3^rd floor named after US cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco etc.

I am just catching up with some admin work that needs to be done before we change classes and I find this is a good time to do it as my students are busy writing their tests. This takes no more than 45 min for them although there are only 20 questions. After the test I will give them a short break as it is a 2 hour class which means they can have a 5-10 min break at the discretion of the teacher, after that we will mark the tests together so they can see what mistakes they made straight away whilst it is fresh in their mind.

The office is already in holiday mode with teachers writing messages on the teacher room white board about what a great time we will be having next week. All the native teachers are going away with one teacher visiting Vietnam for two weeks with teachers from another school. The rest of us are going to Bali. For me it will be my first time there.

I actually have in this class a student whose family have a gift shop in Jakarta and........Bali!!! So I have asked him to give me the address and who I should talk to in Bali to get a good discount on presents for family and friends.

This class is RE (Real English) and is for over 15’s only, although usually it is made up of students who are 17-25 with this class being 17-21. The class is RE03 so is very low level and therefore they do speak lot’s of Indonesian in class, I allow this most of the time, unless we are doing a role play or speaking activity as it allows my students to keep on communicating, if I need them to speak in English I will tell them and they do try their best.

After this class is over I have another RE class this time a higher level RE09 so in that class I will not tolerate speaking in Indonesian as much, talking to get a translation of something they do not understand is fine but that is all. That too will be a test class and I’m not sure they will do too well as most of them have missed many classes.

On last classes (like on Thursday), We do not have to do any studying which is great for the students as they have already written their test, instead we can play educational games, I like to play scrabble or boggle and other word games as it gives the students chance to practice and learn vocabulary, Other things we can do is watch a movie although we cannot watch a whole movie the students enjoy this type of downtime and they are still learning as I give them a quiz about the movie to test their listening skills and make sure they are not just passive listening. If I watch a movie I have never seen before I will just jot down a few questions in my notepad during the movie and ask the questions verbally afterwards.

That’s all from me for today; my students are just finishing their tests so I will give them their well-deserved break!

If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment and don’t forget to rate this blog!

• tests
• last class
• admin
• Paris
• Jakarta
• Indonesia
• EF
• RE
• class
• games