I solemnly promised Deepak I’ll post ( hence I am! ).
We have been rather active as a society recently. Counting, this semester, we have conducted
1) Crossword
2) Essay competition
3) Inchoation (2.0!!!)
4) Turncoat
5) Basic English Workshop
6) Vocabulary Workshop
Not to mention we tried really hard to start off the Movie Club (twice!) but couldn’t (due to unavoidable circumstances, to put it nicely).
Anyhow, Deepak is forcing me to report the Basic English Workshop, so that’s what I’ll do now.
We have been planning to conduct English Classes for the last year now. The reason being, when we ask students to join Lingua Franca, we tell then it will help then improve their English. Now the people with a reasonable understanding of the language can take part in our events and improve themselves through the process of preparing for the event, participation, and by observing others taking part. However, a large chunk of the college population is abysmal in the language, and thus the events aren’t as much help to them as the rest. For most of them, taking part is nothing more than a fantasy. The idea behind the Basic English Classes was to improve the level of such people was to an extent that they can express themselves and hence move to the next step in the process, i.e. participation.
Last year, the president gave Meghna and me the responsibility of conducting classes. I came up with a few ideas, but admittedly, that’s all that I did. Meghna, in classic Meghna fashion, went ahead and planned lessons, study materials, techniques and God knows what else. Then, semester exams came up and everybody forgot about all besides cramming, cramming and cramming. As soon as college reopened, she started working on the idea again, and by the time our tired bodies and brains got over the orientation, she was ready.
Finally, the first class was scheduled for this Tuesday lunchtime. Meghna is one of the members of the rare breed of people who don’t like to miss classes, so what could have been more irritating (and funny) that the teacher for her toughest subject scheduled an extra class on the aforementioned lunchtime! Grudgingly, Meghna missed her extra class and stepped into the shoes of a teacher. We were concerned about the number of people that would turn up but our worries were put to rest as 15-20 people appeared on time. Our confidence was further boosted as more and more people kept turning up, even after half an hour into the class, sometimes arriving in groups herded in by Vivek, making me wonder if he caught every first year passing by and forced them into the class (which, by the way, he assures me he didn’t ).
The class started with Meghna discussing the various aspects of the language, including the structure of sentences and the various parts of a sentence. However, she soon realized that the students were clear about the basics and what they lacked the most was confidence. Infact, some of the students did not need to attend the class in any sense, and she turned them away. Hence, the rest of the class was spent on confidence- building activities. The teacher even awarded the first student who stood up in the class to give a discussion with some toffees (:)).
We distributed worksheets and study material, and as far as I could see from their faces, most students went back thoroughly satisfied and will come back for the next class.
PS: Here you go Deepak, you see I do listen to you sometimes!
