📙 Part 2: Describe a difficult thing you did

This episode's vocabulary

Buff (noun) - a person who knows a lot about and is very interested in a particular subject.

Rudimentary (adj.) - basic.

Trial run (noun) - a practical test of something new or unknown to discover its effectiveness.

Apprehensive (adj.) - feeling worried about something that you are going to do or that is going to happen.

Remarkably (adverb) - used for emphasizing how surprising or unusual something is.

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Questions and Answers

M: Rory here is going to describe a difficult thing he did. He's gonna say what it was, how he did it, why it wasn't easy, and he's gonna say how he felt about it. Rory, are you all ready?

R: Yes.

M: Bring it on.

R: Well, I think I'm forever doing difficult things. But one of the most difficult was using technology in my classes while I was doing my practical placement or the last practical placement, I should say. I've been wanting to use technology in big classes for a while now, but I wasn't sure how to do it, or actually even work up the will to even try to do it. I'm not a big technology buff. So it's not easy for me to think of ways to do this. Also, I'm a little bit lazy. I started out by watching a colleague use it in her lesson. And this was an application called Plickers, where students have a card with a sort of rudimentary QR code on it. And they can turn their cards in a certain way, and give answers to multiple-choice questions that are recorded on a smartphone. And then you use that to show their understanding of different concepts on an interactive whiteboard or a smartboard. It sounds simple enough, but I mean, you try getting 24 small children to understand this concept and show their answers in an acceptable period of time. It was a bit difficult, but after that initial period, it went reasonably well. And I decided to try it out for myself. I downloaded the app. Made up the quiz for it and organized the cards, and having seen how the technology works, I had a reasonable idea of how it should go. But I made sure to do a trial run without the kids beforehand, just in case there was a problem with it. As it turned out, setting up and testing the technology wasn't so hard. But getting the kids to use it was the real problem. Even then it was just a few of them who weren't getting it and they managed after a few examples. But I was a bit apprehensive before I went, well, before I went for it. After I got into and the students were comfortable with it turned out to be remarkably easy to use again and again. Now I'm actually looking forward to doing it with older students, and I think they will be able to more easily express the ideas behind their answers than, well, kids who are six or, well, even five years old.

M: What about your colleagues? Have they done anything like that?

R: Yeah, that's where I got the inspiration from.

M: Thank you, Rory, for your difficult vocabulary and really complicated grammar!

R: For a high score!

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