{"id":1232,"date":"2013-01-09T23:36:56","date_gmt":"2013-01-09T22:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=1232"},"modified":"2024-08-20T02:41:44","modified_gmt":"2024-08-20T00:41:44","slug":"the-cat-parade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=1232","title":{"rendered":"The Cat Parade"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hungry<\/a>\u201cUse these five structures to make three different complaints about your program. You have four minutes.\u201d The task is good, clear, timed and goal oriented. I can\u2019t go wrong. Adding a little excitable jest to it, I grab my watch and assume the \u2018I am timing you\u2019 position. \u201cReady? And then I let them loose with an exaggerated, \u201cGo!\u201d<\/p>\n

For some reason, I expect them to sprint towards the goal like curious cheetahs across the academic Serengeti to attack the linguistic gazelles grazing on the fruits of the information they demand. But instead, it\u2019s as though I\u2019ve overturned a box of kittens, and then asked them to march in a parade. (n.b. No metaphors were harmed in the writing of this post)<\/em><\/p>\n

There are eight university students in the room, so one assumes they\u2019d have the mental ability to concentrate on a task for more than, say, 8 milliseconds.<\/p>\n

But, no.<\/p>\n

The room becomes a scene of disarray, mental wandering, gazing, Slavic languages and technological distractions. There is only one thing to do: act insane.<\/p>\n

By this, I don\u2019t mean lose my temper or shout at them. I mean that sometimes the best way to get a student\u2019s attention is to bring insanity into the classroom. When something is strange, it grabs the attention, even if the listener isn\u2019t terribly interested. This goes for activities and examples too. Consider this, which sentence demonstrating the meaning of the word \u2018unhappy\u2019 do you think the student will best remember?<\/p>\n

She was unhappy because her cat died. <\/i><\/p>\n

She was unhappy because her cat was eaten by a thousand pigs. <\/i><\/p>\n

I\u2019m just saying, sometimes it helps to act like a lunatic. And so I do.<\/p>\n

\u201cHonza, how many of the answers do you have?<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, I am just asking Marketa about our homework for history.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that what I asked you to do?\u201d My left eye starts twitching, though whether this is play-acting a lunatic or the resulting physical manifestation of having to deal with these people for a year, I honestly cannot answer. \u201cAre you in history now?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo\u2026\u201d (eyes cast downward, conveying shame).<\/p>\n

\u201cHonza, I want you to do make those complaints and if you aren\u2019t finished in three minutes, I am going to kill your dog.\u201d At this, the students all look at me in absolute shock. The cat parade has been halted momentarily. I have gotten their attention with a drastic measure, not unlike getting my cat\u2019s attention by putting her face in my mouth and humming Ride of the Valkyries. However, now I don\u2019t have to make it up to my students by covering a sardine in liver p\u00e2t\u00e9 and looking the other way.<\/p>\n

\u201cUm, but I don\u2019t have a dog.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThen I will buy you one and kill it. Get to work.\u201d<\/p>\n

He begins writing and I reflect on how rewarding it is to be present at the birth of a lifelong psychological issue.<\/p>\n

This seems to work and I enjoy my job for approximately seventeen seconds. At second eighteen, a bird flies by the window, so everyone needs to check their Smart phones to make sure that all of their friends are on Facebook. I begin circling the room and monitoring like a policeman on crowd control at a Grateful Dead concert. I want to make sure the activity is moving along, but when I approach any group, the students halt their (totally unrelated) discussions and stare at the paper with pens in their hands and guilty looks on their faces. It\u2019s time again.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou guys doing OK?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOK\u2026stop looking at my shoe!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGet back to work.\u201d I back away slowly while watching them. They begin to work. Throughout the remaining minute and a half of the activity, the students lose focus three more times. I rein them in by singing to my pen, banging my head against the whiteboard and doing a moonwalk.<\/p>\n

They finally stick to the assigned work and I see discussions, teamwork and note writing. This is great! They\u2019re doing the activity; they\u2019re actually discussing complaints about the program, coming up with ideas and writing them down.<\/p>\n

Upon feedback it becomes apparent that there was a cohesive subject to the eventual success of the activity, something they all found highly interesting and controversial to complain about: Me.<\/p>\n

Dammit, the cats are on parade, and they\u2019re organized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cUse these five structures to make three different complaints about your program. You have four minutes.\u201d The task is good, clear, timed and goal oriented. I can\u2019t go wrong. Adding a little excitable jest to it, I grab my watch and assume the \u2018I am timing you\u2019 position. \u201cReady? And then I let them loose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-jS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1232"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6103,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232\/revisions\/6103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}