ETW

Sat 26th May 2007

The GraveSide

• Lost my phone
• It started late
• Hated being there
• Hated being there
• Bit boring; same, the taught and ‘taughter’! read Freire

What had me there!

• Programme: English Teachers’ Workshop (ETW)
• Venue: Makumira Secondary School
• Facilitator: Mr. Tamamu, Deputy Zonal Inspector of Schools, Northern Zone.
• Theme: Strategies for Presenting Language III texts.

How it went

1. Introductions; just your name and school you are from as plain as that, my name is so and so from there! (do not ask me what I expected!)
   
   Do you know what are frozen relations? So we started off the day with an Ice breaker:
   a. What dries as it gets wet?
   Towel, tissue paper
   b. How many eyes do you have?
   Two (2)! Damnit that’s obvious! even a blind would say so. Be ‘eyes’ though this is a distracter.
   c. Which river in the world has four ‘aiz’?
   People were caught and started asking which ‘ai’ but the answer was the Mississippi. Therefore the idea of Homo-phones, nyms, graphs etc.
2. Then followed a Warm up activity; facilitator was really pressing on this that teachers do apply this in class. An example; gone into a class that had Maths the preceded period, got in, start right away with your English lesson! Phew!
   So we did an activity on Anagrams: more on wordsmith
   
   Sort out the following anagrams as shown in the example below:-
   Change agree into another word for keen= eager
   Now you can do this:
   Change asleep into word used by polite people
   Change beard into something you eat
   Change below into part of the body
   Change bleat into an item of furniture
   Change cheap into fruit
   Change swap into an insect
   Change thing into time of day
   Change cruelty into word for knives, forks, etc.
   Change chain into a country
   Change flog into a popular sport
   Change flow into (a) an animal (b) a bird
   Change super into something you keep money
   Change lamp into another part of the body
   Change hated into something that comes to everybody
   Change rat into a substance used in making tarmac roads
   More on anagrams on the net including this one from manythings.org, I liked this site, this one creates anagram after you've put a word. To be honest being a student is one of the most few sweet things in the world that I enjoy
3. Now to the THEME
   

   HANDLING LANGUAGE III TEXTS

   
   Some questions rose as ‘why should it be called lang. III?’ etc. (any guess?)
   Some flashback followed thing like
   The theory of Literature
   The definition:- artistic use of lang. to reflect social realities.
   More on Internet Public Lib and on Wiki

Consider:
Marriage has lot of problems (plain lang.)
A husband is a band to bind your life
A wife is a knife to cut your life

So we agreed that literature is

• Imaginative
• Artistic
• Uses lang. as medium
• Expresses social experiences, realities, problems etc. political, cultural, economic etc.

Then followed lengthy discussion on figures of speech; similes, metaphor, hyperbole, irony, satire, and well you know ‘em. <more on fig. o speech; activity, wiki
We went through topics as Literature and Society and saw that lit. develops from the society as it draws political etc. experiences from that society. Consider Hugh Langston’s
‘The Ballad of the Landlord’ or Claude Makaay’s ‘If we must Die’.
Followed by Literature and Culture and concluded that lit. is an expression of culture. Consider ‘Three Suitors one Husband’ and Ngugi wa Thiongo’s ‘The River Between’.

We then did Types of Lit.(oral written), their differences, Forms/Genres of Lit. ( non-fiction fiction drama poetry), form and content, and wind up with Functions of lit. (didactic aesthetic)

The day was steamy and hot, we took a break.

The following session was mainly on teaching strategies and methods; specifically how to get pupils interested, motivated etc.
The facilitator introduced two excellent methods on ‘Characters and characterization’ namely; Name dropping and Cross Word puzzle.

An example of Name dropping taken from 'Things Fall Apart'
I innocent
K knowledgeable
E energetic
M martyr
E entertaining
F friendly
U unexpectedly meets death
N naive
A adaptable

After general introduction and quick explanation of the two method we got into work; trying to create the two activities using different texts. Before we left we had to display what we did in the groups, I enjoyed group work dearly.