Jordan CO2

On Thursday, November 15, I observed my second class at CIES, Victoria Davis's speaking class. While I did not get to directly observe Ms. Davis lecturing or otherwise presenting a lesson on speaking, I was not disappointed with her students' presentations! They were sharing with the class their research into a specific topic, and giving a short speech accompanied by a PowerPoint slide show, and then taking questions. The subjects were quite varied between each presentation, and very informative and interesting as they were comparing aspects of life such as food, driving, hospitality and education in their home countries with how they saw them in the United States. I learned about driving in Korea, food in Iceland, hospitality in Kuwait and education in Japan! I was offered a date from Kuwait, the most delicious I've ever tasted, and I found out some common dishes in Iceland - not only on their similar-to-Thanksgiving holiday, "Thorinn", but they will regularly consume aged raw shark, burned and boiled sheep's head, and horse meat (I tried spicy horse jerky in Ukraine and it was great!). Another interesting fact I learned was that in Japan, students have a designated "cleaning time" where they help clean up their classrooms and schools! I can only assume this makes a drastic reduction in janitorial expenses.

Ms. Davis was very attentive and helpful during the presentations, managing the classroom authoritatively but still allowing students freedom to occasionally stray off topic and find things to laugh about in their discussion. She handed out scoring rubrics to each student, and they were supposed to judge and critique each others' presentations. After everyone had finished, she explained to me, they would be given a "student grade" which was an average of everyone else's evaluations, as well as a "teacher grade" with her feedback. This activity seems like it would be useful to repeat in my own classroom, with students of a similar high-intermediate skill level. The students in Ms. Davis's class really seemed to enjoy getting to know more about their peers and cultural background!