October 11, 2010: The interview

October 11, 2010: Teaching has become more or less routine. In order to stimulate more interest in my lessons, I made two changes to my pre-intermediate and intermediate lessons. For the pre-intermediate students, I assigned them a research project. Their task is to research a national park in the US and prepare a PowerPoint presentation or create a poster to use to make at least a two minute presentation about the park. They are working in pairs and so far, they've selected Yellowstone, Death Valley, and Arches National Parks. When I described the assignment to them, they all seemed to take an interest in doing the task and had several questions to ask about what was expected of them. 

For the Intermediate students, I have created what I hope will be an interesting activity on giving directions. We'll see how that turns out. (For those of you who were "fortunate" enough to take my V&V class at JPL, you can probably guess what the activities are.) Meanwhile, the students have done fairly well in dictation and have done well at learning new idioms. One student suggested that rather than recite the dialogs I have prepared for them, that they should be able to write the dialogs themselves. I think this is a good suggestion so I'll leave it to them to decide if they would rather learn my prepared dialog or write one themselves subject to rules that I established about the dialogs. We'll see how many create their own dialogs. Should be interesting.

In the afternoon I was interviewed by two seniors who actually videotaped me answering questions they asked about where I'm from, what I did at JPL, what other background experience I have teaching, and what my impressions are of life in Hungary and at the school. I answered the questions easily and managed (I hope) to be positive in my answers. They told me that the interview will be posted on the school's website and that they'd let me review it beforehand to edit out anything I find objectionable. I'll provide the website address after this is done so you can hear the interview yourself (and also learn more about my school -- actually, I think I provided the website address in one of my very first postings back in February, 2010).

To hear the interview, click on this link: Interview at Ujpest