The debate was prepared in two groups, each side preparing their arguments. Some of the quotes from my students:

• “Competition gets the lazy ones to work harder”
• “cooperation among students can teach more than a formal class”
• “competition spurs you on”
• “competition is discouraging”

The students felt the victory went to the side arguing for competition. I am not so sure that I agree with them, although that side definitely came up with some good arguments.

I had another idea for a debate on education, but we didn’t do it with this group: corporal punishment and whether it has a place in education.

With this group of students, the debate might have been too divisive among the different countries. But we did touch on it with bullying. Physical punishment for children – what does it really teach them?

This question arose in part from the Listening /Speaking passages on homework and asking other students for help.

The discussion also came from one student’s experiences at an American Community College. She wasn’t able to take good notes because the teacher spoke very quickly and the student’s English was not very good.

She emailed other students in the class and asked them to give her their notes so she could study them. I asked her if anyone had actually sent her the notes. She said only another international student but none of the American students.

She couldn’t understand this but, of course, I could. We had a great discussion about student culture in different countries (lots of vocabulary came out of this!).

As the students explained to each other, in some countries, students “stick together” at all costs. Sharing notes is considered helping out your fellow student, and everyone is expected to support everyone else.

In other countries, education is very much an individual endeavor. Asking someone else for their notes can sometimes be seen as not wanting to do your own work and just wanting to benefit from the work of others. As this student soon learned, the situation in the US is much closer to this end of the spectrum.

This was a great opportunity for me to point out to the students why we spend so much time on note taking skills! Being able to take notes is a very important skill, and it’s one my international students need to develop—they may not be able to look at anyone else’s!

That class was very lively.

In general, the students correctly predicted the very negative effects of bullying on victims (lifelong psychological scarring) and the fact that shy or quiet children were often targeted — those who couldn’t fight back or were afraid, especially among girls.

But they did not predict the high rate of later criminal behavior among bullies. Sometimes students got “leadership” and bullying mixed up. Nor did they predict the studies revealing that bullies of both sexes were quite often victimized, beaten, or denigrated in their own homes.

The interesting point for everyone was how much this problem preoccupied people in all countries. In some countries, students committed suicide when they did not do well enough in school to please their families or were shamed in front of fellow students. In other places, it was tied to dating and rivalries among girls.

One question to research was how to prevent or stop bullying. The students were very skeptical about the “conflict resolution peer groups” used in many high schools in the U.S. today. They were interested in the fact that such efforts existed here while in most countries the problem is ignored. However, they doubted that anything could be done.

Next year, I would like to invite a speaker from one of these groups to speak to the students. This was a very lively discussion and in addition to fluency practice, we learned a lot of new vocabulary and a lot about each other’s countries and culture.

For the next class, I prepared a question sheet about bullying and the students worked on answering the questions to the best of their ability in small groups of mixed nationalities. The questions were:

• Why do some children become bullies?
• Why are some children victims of bullying?
• What should you do if you see bullying?
• What are the consequences of bullying for the victims? For the bullies?

For homework each group was given ONE of the questions to research on the web. They were told to find expert opinion on the issues by consulting reputable websites (and we discussed how to tell websites of value by looking on the web together as a class).

The students had to find answers to the question their group was assigned and report back to the class. They also had to compare their original thinking with the experts’ opinion.

I’ll report on the actual discussion next time.

Almost all the students remembered some positive experiences learning about friendship or loyalty or how to get along with others. But students from all nine countries, from Western Europe to Eastern Europe to Asia and Latin America, remembered incidents of bullying as they grew up.

They said it was rampant and were very shocked to hear that it had not been a major problem in past generations. Now it seems ubiquitous. Each student (sadly) gave examples of bullying and the worst seemed to be among girls. We practiced indirect speech and paraphrasing by having another student summarize what had just been said and we compared experiences.

This gave an interesting background for what most of my students did not at first understand: home schooling. Put in this context – as a possible reaction to bullying and other negative influences — the home schooling movement from Reading One became less completely strange to them.

How have you all handled discussions of bullying with your students?

We started with Reading Two, the great story from Isaac Asimov called “The Fun They Had.” In the story, children from the future looked back on “the good old days” and how great it was to go to school (instead of relying on computer-learning at home). The children of the future were starved for the companionship and relationships that school can bring.

Then we asked the students to write for 5 minutes in free writing (not paying attention to errors but just brainstorming) on what they learned from other children in school: good and bad. Then they read their paragraphs to other students and commented on the results.

I’ll post the results of this activity next. How do you work with this particular unit?

I gave them this worksheet to accompany a video clip from the movie “He’s Just Not That Into You”.  The clip shows two friends shopping at the drug store and discussing one’s misadventures in trying to get in touch with a potential date. The main character, Mary, is very frustrated about having to check seven electronic portals just to see if anyone has tried to get in touch with her.

• What tone do you think Mary uses when she says, “I can’t text. I’m just not charming via text.”?

Does she feel down about not being good at texting? Or, does she feel frustrated? I modeled the two ways of expressing those emotions and then we watched the clip.

The worksheet analyzes how her pronunciation manifests frustration, and offers students practice in this. It also preps them for the clip by reviewing vocabulary, main ideas, and offers two conversation activities: tell a frustrating story, explain when you like to and don’t like to use technology for socializing.

The students appreciated the topic.  I saw that it generated a lot of good discussion and opportunities to use their English skills.

• In science experiments the agent (the grad student or the professor) is not as important as what was discovered.
  • The lab assistant obtained DNA from the remains. The lab assistant is not important.
  • DNA cells were obtained from the remains. (by the lab assistant = can be left out)
• We don’t really know who or what the agent is.
  • All questions will be answered within 24 hours. We don’t know who will answer them – maybe a group of employees of the corporation.
• We want to avoid responsibility.
  • Mr Dupont and I will lay off 100 workers. -> 
  • One hundred workers will be laid off. This is more impersonal and makes it seem that no one is responsible.

As an example from the news, I gave the students this news article from many (many) years ago. I also gave them these exercises to help them see that the passive voice is often used to shift the focus from the agent to an impersonal source.

It’s easy to see from the article that not much information was available and no one wanted to say anything. Nothing was sure. However, the papers needed news so the reporters wrote this article.

The press was a really interesting topic for my students and I think the lessons with this chapter were very successful.

All of these discussions gave the students a little taste of university courses on Media Studies. We made a list of the kinds of things people criticize in the press:

• news companies want to make profits and they like sensational stories (like the NorthStar story about coverage of the bombing suspect)
• sometimes they print things without being sure of the evidence
• they are too intrusive in people’s private lives, particularly politicians (Gennifer Flowers in the NorthStar story)
• they give too much time to stars and athletes
• they only talk about what’s good for their own country

What do yours students think of the press? Do these issues come up in class? How do you usually structure the discussions and activities?

We also discussed libel laws in different countries. In the U.S., if you are considered a “public figure” a libel verdict is very hard to prove since it is assumed that you put yourself forward and have to take the consequences of the “free market of ideas.” In other countries, the question of libel is more narrowly defined.

This was a very challenging listening for the students BUT I played only the first 7 minutes of the interview. Then I allowed them to read the interactive transcript provided by the program. We listened again and discussed the answers to my comprehension questions in groups. 

Here are the exercises I used.

The students really got into the discussion.

One student said he thought journalists were killed in some countries (including his own) because they told lies. Another student asked him why anyone would kill reporters because they told lies. It seemed more likely that they were telling a truth that powerful people didn’t want to hear.

Lots of silence after that exchange.

Some students defended censorship on the internet “because young people can be influenced to do bad things.” The idea of being able to “make up your own mind” and having access to information was discussed –“the right to know.” In a dictatorship, it doesn’t matter whether the average citizen is well-informed. In fact, it’s better for government control if they are not.

These discussions have been great for getting students to really engage with the language and use new words and expressions. What lessons have you created that got students’ interest?