Method 1

Well my poems I have decidedto keep them off this blog for the time being as most are too personal and then I end up defending myself or clarifying my feelings. Most people do not seem to understand that it was a moment in time that I have recorded and not my whol ephilosophy of life!!!!!!!!

So you are stuck with my rambling prose pieces if you are checking this blog. So what is it that I ramble about today? Well old topics in a new bottle work mighty well for me. So here goes.

I was thinking of getting my students to perform skits in class. Impromptu ones, where I give each a role to adhere to and they improvise as they are performing. Except that the information I would give to each roleplayer might be contradictory. For example, I tell student A that she was interested in purchasing a state-of-art laptop for her tech crazy kid brother and the she should be asking the salesperson loads of uestions in order to make up her mind between two models, I tell student B that this customer is wasting the time of your juniors by haranguing them for details of some product or the other and then not purchasing it and that this has been goin on for more than a week and that Student B needs to be firm with the customer. Given these roles the students have to adhere to them and develop their dialogues while they are interacting with the other roleplayer.

While the roleplay was fun and they had to polish their language skills as well in the course of this activity (the objective of the activity is language enhancement), I realised that this activity can get out-of-hand for students aged 17-19 and especially in a mixed group. It worked really well with my TISS students who are more mature, but these kids seem to be more involved in how rude the other person was or how weak instead of focussing on the role given to them. Too many clashes led me to cancel this activity in this particular class.

I did have fun while it lasted, but the after class tension was actually firing the class rivalry system. I was there to promote communication efficiency and not develop exisiting tensions. The post class conselling for mitigating rival faction problems was too exhausting. I do not know if this makes me a poor teacher who is not interested in trying to work out solutions for the class. It is just that there are so many other activities that were easier to introduce to the clas to enhance their language skills that I did away with this one. Yet, a doubt lingers. Did I give up too easily? Should I have continued the activity and hoped that students would learn to interact better even in conflicting situations?

I don't know if I gave up too easily this time. I do know that my class runs more smoothly and I have less post class complaints about how students are teasing a particular roleplayer. I also know that next year I am going to introduce this very same activity to another batch and hope I would have learnt from my mistakes and improve students' communication skills and teach them the art of negotiating not through case studies but though their own situations.

If you guys have any ideas, please do let me know.