And sometimes the bear eats you

Not a great day teaching. In fact, a pretty bad day. I thought I had a good lesson for the first session laying of the parts of an argument and the relation between premises and conclusion. A lot of stuff on the board for them to take in and practice on. But at the break one of the students said that everyone "wanted to play games." This is how most of the volunteers teach, by getting the students to play games and such. I said, "If you want to play games, go to the park," which he did not seem to get. Fun activities are important but as well they really need to develop their English skills and I just don't see how games are going to do that. The different skill level is problematic as well: The better ones seem bored and the lower skilled ones just don't get anything. But when I asked the higher level ones to formulate a simple thesis it was clear they could not do it and so had no idea of what was going on. So while I know I have to do other things besides lecture, I just don't think games are the way to go. The second part of class was an unmitigated disaster. I had planned to put them in the same groups they were in yesterday to get them to argue against the very thing they had argued for yesterday. I realized at the break this would not be a good idea and I would have tried something different except one of the supervisors came in to observe so I decided to stick to the plan which I knew was awful, and was right. They were like, "we just did this yesterday," which in fact they had. At least I console myself with the fact that my instincts were solid.