Monday, August 25, 2014

Service: Teaching English Club

            Following the tradition that was started by the seniors of last year, as the seniors of this year, we will be taking over as the teachers of this year’s Debate Club. After evaluation of last year’s Debate Club during the previous academic year, we discussed the idea of an English Club instead. What we found in our discussion is that it with the passing of time, the number of people coming to the Debate club meetings decreased, and towards the end of February, only a few people were present, and many had lost interest in Debate Club. Part of the reason for this, we felt, is that after there were no longer any competitions for us to prepare for and attend, it felt that the meetings began to lose some of their purpose, especially as the process of practicing by researching to prepare to oppose or support motions is time consuming, and many of us found that we had others things that needed attending such as our school work, and preparing the motions took time away from that. We then came up with the help of Ms. Debbie, the idea of an English Club, instead, which can be a place where people come to learn something that they have interest in or would like to develop, that is English or language related, and would hopefully tailor to their needs more.
            Today, we had our first meeting this academic year, where we started to plan English Club in more detail. We have come up with a number of units, including News Casting and Writing, Creative Writing, Debating, Paper Presentation, Speech, and Storytelling. These units are more flexible, and it is possible for us in the future to merge a number of units together or replace them with something else. With this new units system, we decided that students will be allowed to attend only the units that they are interested in attending, and we hope that this will keep students interested in English Club. This means that now, someone can sign-up for all the units, but at the same time, they are allowed to sign-up to just one unit. Aside from this, each unit will only be roughly 4 meetings long (at 1 meeting per week), and we hope that this will further keep them interested in English Club. Between ourselves, we split the jobs in terms of who in particular from the seniors will be specifically in charge of a unit. I will be the PIC for the News Casting and Writing unit, along with Jennifer and Febe, and I will be helping with the Creative Writing and Debating unit, and possibly the Speech unit. I will also try to attend the meetings for the other units.

           During this first meeting, we also discussed how we are going to promote English Club and emphasised our discussion around the News Casting and Writing unit, as this would be our first unit. In terms of promoting English club, aside from sending e-mails and placing information in the school’s weekly news web page, we decided to go to homerooms to promote English Club. We will be going on Thursday, August 28, to various homerooms. I will be going with my friend Febe to the homerooms of Grade 11.1 and 11.2. In terms of the News Casting and Writing unit itself, we talked about some general things regarding the topic, such as the main framework of what we will do during the four meetings that we have. The first meeting will be an introduction, and we will be splitting them up to work in groups, where each group will be asked to create a news casting video, which we will play during the fourth and final meeting.

No comments:

Post a Comment