myblog

Variety

For a recording of me reading this blog, see the LingQ lesson. Look here for my LingQ profile.

As I said before, the main focus is the interest or the energy of the conversation... how to keep the energy at a high enough level so that it's possible for your students to be interested in it. Now, to some extent you will never be able to control the student. I mean if the student is having a bad day, well, they're not going to be interested in anything. But if you are doing your part and you are making the intre... the discussion energetic enough, then you will be at least giving the student a chance to be interested.

Now, um, the point I made in the pa.. last podcast was that it's not necessarily easy to predict what will be energising or interesting for the group. And um... so that raises the question: What are you going to do to prepare? Well some peo.. you don't have to prepare, that's one answer to the question. I think that at LINGQ the... um some of the tutors are people who prepare and some of them may not prepare very much. I'm a person who prepares... although sometimes I prepare too much which actually doesn't help me... it just makes me annoyed because I'm obsessing over something that I know I have no control over. And sometimes I don't prepare at all... which goes alright fifty percent of the time, and the other fifty percent of the time. I realise that I'm selling the students a bit short by not preparing.

So how do you find the happy medium? How do you prepare.. uh...if you are person who will prepare, how do you prepare to the extent which won't make you resentful and which will be giving the students the best value. Well, I think that uhh one technique... and this will be my major point for this podcast... is the idea of variety. You should be always ready to change the current of a conversation at any point and so in preparation for that you should try to have as many different takes on a certain topic as you possibly can. Or perhaps even multiple topics. That will be always more interesting for the students I think than trying to squeeze as much out of one topic as you possibly can. So, um... preparation could be writing out as many different questions on each topic and preparing as many different topics as you can withing a reasonable time frame.

Throwing Spaghetti at the Wall

For a recording of me reading this blog, see the LingQ lesson. Look here for my LingQ profile.

So umm I... I am just starting this blog again after a long time. I am trying a new technique. I'm just speaking without preparing a text first... and then later I will be typing this out. Ummm (I) think it's going to be a lot easier to get something completed this way because when I am writing first I tend to get lost in thought and I have trouble finishing what I am trying to do. This way.. well... I'll be finished and I just have to transcribe what I have said even though I think... well, who knows, maybe it will be more interesting than what I have written and then subsequently spoken. Ummm the things I have been trying to do lately have been to get an essay written about how to tutor at LINGQ. There is already the guidelines for how to tutor at LINGQ but I've been writing an essay about my personal spin on it. It's been really hard because it's a very difficult thing to break down into a system or a strategy. Tutoring is very instinctual and um you often are just throwing spaghetti at the wall, as it were. There's an expression when ... in English when you say uh... when you're trying to do something through trial and error you say you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks or not. That's what tutoring is like often. You're just coming in and you are trying to make it as interesting as possible. You'll have some preparations but you don't know if it's going to work or not and you don't know if you are going to use them or not cause when you're tutoring you're always...the only rule I guess is when you're tutoring you're always trying to dance around the area where there is the most group excitement and it may not even be close to what you were prepared to tutor. Umm that's in itself a very profound statement. I mean, a lot of teachers would prefer just to teach what they prepared even if there is no excitement in the group about it. But I find that, you know, the zest of tutoring is more about being in the moment with a group and only using your plans if it fits with the moment rather than forcing the moment to fit with your plans.