Electrical Class

Today, the students did some review on some basic electrical terms, such as micro, milli, pico, etc. The students understood how to do the calculations, but had a lot of difficulty explaining them.

I taught the students to frame their explanation like this: well, um, today, I learnt that "milli" was ten to the power of negative three. Actually, I already knew this, but I learnt how to explain it in English, um, yeah, I also learnt other vocabularly like this, such as, um, do you know, "pico?"
Oh, well, "pico" is.............

The students, hopefully, understand how to talk about what they learnt in a very general way. Of course, I don't understand about the details of the Electrical Engineering class, but if the students begin to talk about what they did - as well as gauging the level of knowledge of the interactant, then it starts to generate a conversation. I intend to do this type of structure to ask about all of their specific classes. My aim is to get the students to repeat the specific vocabularly, as well as generally apply the "theoretical" side to a more "practical" side. I find that the students can easily understand the equations and work their way through difficult calculations, but miss the actual aim of why they are doing these equations. Explaining why they are doing these equations actually forces the students to apply their knowledge in a broader more practical approach, which will hopefully reinforce their learning.

Today the students were very tired when they came to my English class from 3-4. I gave the students some time to gather their thoughts and said that we will do something "fun" tomorrow - they wanted to play badminton, so I think I'll dust off my white bata bullets tonight ready for English class at the gym tomorrow. A bit of fun to relieve the stress never goes a miss.