January 27, 2009

Today's lessons were kinda blah. I need to come up with some more exciting topics to teach about. I fell back on the debate idea today. Students split up into two groups (for or against), were given the debate topic (either "Parents should be held accountable for their children's actions" or "Homosexual couples should be allowed to marry"), and then had 10 minutes to come up with as many arguments as possible. After time was up, they put down their pencils and took turns flinging opinions at one another in support of their side. The lesson went over well with the Terminale and Premiere students, but the Secondes seemed to either not understand what we were doing or their attention spans were too short. Oh well, better luck next time, I guess. But it was good to try out the debate idea. However if I plan to do debates in the future, I just need to keep in mind that the Secondes aren't as good at supporting/disputing an issue when they don't necessarily agree with it.