I'm currently halfway through a pig-slow upper intermediate lesson: plodding boggily through past tenses, with the prospect of an hour and a half of reading to come.
Yesterday, I had a moment of inspiration regarding time/place lines, and in particular one of Michael Lewis' ideas, something that I think will make the final version of my presentation. I now have only three days to get the raw version complete.

Ready, Steady, Teach!

What's the fastest you've ever put a lesson together from scratch? And no, I don't mean just turning to pages 42-48 in Headway Intermediate. How long do you think it takes?
Watching the execrable wasteland that is daytime TV in the UK, one of teh brighter moments was 'Ready, Steady, Cook' on BBC2. For those who don't know it, the idea is that two cooks have to make several dishes from a bag of ingredients given to them by members of the studio audience. Of course, they also have a fridge and larder stuffed with the basics, but it requires imagination.
So why not do it ourselves when it comes to lesson prep? I think it is possible to create a one and a half hour lesson, from scratch, in about 20 minutes. Here are the rules:
1) there are clear aims and objectives to the lesson.
2) you are allowed to use any 'off-the-shelf' ingredients, but you cannot use more than one page from a standard textbook and nothing directly from a workbook
3) there must be at least two skills practised, one as a main focus, one as subsidiary - so, for example, listening and speaking/pronunciation
4) there must be at least one original piece of work - this can be an adaptation of 'off-the shelf' materials or techniques, or an entirely new piece.
5) you get extra points for the relevant use of realia or current new items.

Sure, this is what we're meant to be doing, but in reality, I think we either overplan (if we're beginners, or doing a Dip.) or we just reach for the safety and convenience of a textbook. The latter is all very well and fine - after all, they're the product of people with years of classroom experience - but they are designed with an idealised, generic class in mind. Without wanting to be rude, they are McLessons - the pedagogical equivalent of fast food. When we know our students and their needs, it is clearly not enough to give them this fare all the time.

getting nervous.

Despite years of standing up in front of various strangers who understand me to varying degrees and making a total tool of myself, I am now starting to feel extremely apprehensive about standing up in front of my peers, who will understand me only too well, and possibly making a complete arse of myself. I will be giving the presentation, which currently is residing in bits and notes all over the place, a dry run next friday, then the real thing on the 17th. Even as I write it and ponder over the idea, new thoughts have crowded forward, sometimes making what I want to say clearer, sometimes more complex, and sometimes I feel that all I'm trying to do is reinvent the wheel. However, I'm absolutely certain I'm on to something: by seeing verb forms and tenses in terms of being 'here' or 'there', it makes certain structures, in particular future forms and conditionals, much more accessible. What is going to be controversial, however, is what I'm going to suggest about 'going to'. I'm not about to say any more right now: I want it to be a surprise.

on the work front, I had a rather tedious afternoon session with The Group That Think They're Better At English Than They Actually Are. How can one make reading sessions more interesting?

thinking between lessons ruins your appetite.

A very quick post, as I'm in a break between classes. Yesterday turned, once more, into one of those where a whole lot of paperwork gets done and not much else. So, once again, I didn't get much of mty presentation completed. I'm still tussling with a couple of the key ideas relating to the whole distance thing, but I'm about to try a notion in class and see what the students make of it. Probably a shed load of confusion, but what the hey. They've already been shown the way that we can concieve of past forms as being notionally 'there'; what we're going to do now is compare narrative tenses and see what happens. How is the third form of the verb more apart from the second form? are the past simple and the past continous in the same 'there'? does the past perfect occupy a space that is best described as 'beyond there' and how does this relate to the notion that the present perfect occupies a space inbetween the present and the past?
let's see how they deal with these.

bits and pieces.

This has been one of those frustrating days when I don't seem to have achieved much, apart from wade through paperwork and little bits and pieces. The writing retake exams seemed to have gone without a hitch, and the entries for the speaking and listening exams in december appear to be all on course, so I'm happy on that count. As for preparations for the conference - hmm, slower than I want. It's all started to appear far more real now and I can feel the slow dread hand of panic starting to creep over me.

deixis midnight runners?

Have you ever heard of deixis? no, neither had I until yesterday.
A quick question for Irish or Scottish readers out there:is the phrase 'will you have/be having a cup of tea?' more polite than 'do you want a cup of tea?' Is it preferred to 'Would you like a cup of tea?', and does it have the same connotation of politeness?

lost time

I hadn't realised how much time had elapsed since my last posting on this site. This is partly due to being so damn busy at the beginning of term, and partly to lassitude in filling it in. In all honesty however, I haven't been doing much since then in terms of study or research. It's getting the opportunity to do some that has been the problem.
anyway, here's some information about what I'll be doing next month at the EnglishUK Teachers' conference. I'm up against Adrian Underhill, so I suspect I'll be playing to the TEFL equivalent of one man and a dog called Colin. I will be dealing with Tenses in English and the Notion of Distance. My key idea is that we can understand the English Tense system by visualising it in terms of relative proximity to the speaker's point of view; That is, we can deal with tenses by seeing them as being 'here', 'there', or 'in between', and that by using this process we can give answers to the reasons why we choose particular forms to express concepts relating to futurity; explain why certain conditionals and polite forms choose to use'past' forms of the verb; and why we need to use 'to' in order to create the full infinitive in English, and how the full infinitive has a consistent, single and remarkably simple function when used in verb patterns (but not with certain adjectives); And also to suggest that one particular piece of grammar has been presented inaccurately since God Knows When.
That's the idea, anyway.