Alexandra CO 3

OBSERVATION 3 – Listening with Marylyn

Today I attended one of the last lessons on the roster, listening class with Marylyn. Unlike Olga, who had actively included me in the class activities but did not formally announce my presence, Marylyn asked me to introduce myself. Marylyn has a playful, relaxed and casual style, at least with this group. Likewise the students were overall more extroverted and playful, and more advanced speakers. With time I found that one of the students tended to dominate the classroom, perhaps without realizing it, but she did a good job of redirecting his contributions to the other students to ask them for their opinions.Marylyn asked the students if they ever listened to NPR in their spare time, to which one of the students exclaimed, “So boring!”. He said that instead, he preferred listening to TED. Perhaps this is due to the fact that TED is more conversational in style, Marylyn explained, as opposed to NPR which has a distinctly journalistic tone.

Marylyn discussed the day’s vocabulary before the group listening assignment, an excerpt from NPR’s series, this I believe, and interview with Christian McBride, a Juilliard alum and bass player in a band. Essentially, the point of the spoken essay boiled down to: “People who stress age quicker, but those who stay cool will stay young forever”. While the students reviewed, there was a fair amount of dead air while they found words in the dictionary ( a silence which I was not used to), but seemed to reinvigorate the students’ memory. Encouraged them to collaborate and find various meanings in words, not just singular interpretations. She clearly drew from her own life in using examples and acting out the emotions. Marylyn used a lot of real world examples: for example: “If you tried to go out on a date with a girl, who would open the door? The father. The father would give you the third degree.” She encouraged the students to make their own sentences in this way, and the students had a good sense of humor about themselves when they made mistakes since she would laugh along too. She sat at one of the desks, facing the students.

Marylyn is very good at drawing out students’ own interpretations of the words. Marylyn also used the students themselves in their examples, for instance, “If later today, I see Habib…”. (Speaking of which, she also focused a lot on Habib today, who seemed to be despondent about his test low practice TOEFL scores and was acting somewhat sullen). Despite his sullen demeanor, her disposition was always sunny, which prevented it from weighing down the rest of the class. Eventually she asked him directly, “Why aren’t you smiling, today?”. Having been gently prodded enough by Marylyn’s purposeful inclusion of him in the conversation despite his own lack of volunteering by using him as examples, by this point, he was ready to admit “I’m not here [mentally] today.” After that he started to open up and contribute a little more to the discussions. I was very impressed. Clearly Marylyn is very sophisticated in classroom management and interpersonal strategies. I took away many good pointers from this class today.