martes, marzo 28, 2006

Selfish.

I teach conversational English every night for 4 hours. 5:30-9:30PM. If I ever have a similar work schedule ever again, I hope some supernatural power is nice enough to strike me down. It would be just fine if my day started late. But when you have morning classes starting at 8:30AM and a large gap in between and you don't do naps? You must be on crack.

Anyway, with these conversation classes... at the advanced levels they leave the class up to the teacher's creativity. Meaning, you have no textbook, no programmed agenda, no nothing! I love it! I just do readings. I take an article from CNN.com I may have been too sleepy to get to during the day. I take in a book review. When I'm really down, I read Edgar Allen Poe's Raven poem with them. Maybe I do this last one a bit too much. I am teaching the Raven sometimes as often as once a week! I get a kick out of fantasizing I am just like Christopher Walken reading said poem with his students in the Dead Zone.

Today I think I went a bit too far. I had them read and analyze Black Diamond Bay by Bob Dylan. I am really getting into Dylan's narrative songs. Anything with a story. I am interested in this, so my class will be obliged discuss it with me! They liked it well enough for the first 45 minutes. Then I had another class with the same group and tried to continue with the same topic. The woman, the Greek, the hotel under molten lava. How can you not be interested?? Needless to say it was overkill. For them. I still enjoyed my class. And damn it if I didn't resent changing the topic when I saw they had had enough!