On January 23 I observed Angel Rios' speaking class. I noticed that Rios is a very energetic teacher who likes to move around a lot and gets very excited about the students' learning. I think this is important for his class because it makes for a very comfortable environment. In this class, there was one student that had a presentation to give about another student. It was very interesting to watch and I could tell that the student was very engaged with this activity. He was even able to make his presentation humorous and that was something that made the whole class comfortable and could have lowered their affective filters. After the presentation, the students had a worksheet in which they were to define and make a sentence with a few words. The students worked on this during class and shared their answers when they were done. After the students read a passage that contained those vocabulary words and Rios went over the passage each section at a time. He explained that when reading a passage in English, you may come across words you do not know and that that is okay, just keep reading and get the main idea from the reading. I was actually able to take his advice and later complete a Spanish reading that had been difficult for me because of the words I was not sure of. In the end, this classroom observation showed me the importance of patience when working with students. Rios patiently waited for them to finish their vocabulary worksheets and patiently helped them work through the reading passage.
My third conversation partner meeting was with Josue, my conversation partner from Paris, France. He suggested that we go to a restaurant for this meeting, and recommended the Colombian restaurant on Tennessee St. called "Super Perros". I had never been to this restaurant before, so it was interesting to not only converse with someone from outside of my culture but also at a cultural restaurant with an atmosphere and menu different than what I am used to. Most of the menu was in Spanish, so we were able to bond over trying to figure out what the menu was saying, and ended up sharing a lot of laughs over it. During our meeting, we caught up on how he was doing at CIES, what he's involved in in Tallahasee, and discussed deeper topics such as the current political affairs going on in France. This led to a grander discussion about American politics, and it turned out we had similar views. It was interesting to connect our ideas across border lines, realizing we all want the ...
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