u/GrizzKarizz

If anyone has a copy, I'd greatly appreciate a link.

Thank you!

Daisy mentioned the band The Sundays.

I hadn't heard of them since I was a teenager and me, a teenage boy, was infatuated with Harriet. I played Summertime on repeat. Their other albums were fantastic.

I wonder if this is a reference to Lucy Halliday being from that general area or if one of the writers are a fan? Or even if at the time of forming Gilead, The Sundays were at the height of their popularity? But I don't remember them being that big a band.

I’ve been an ALT for far too long. I was the main teacher from 2012, until 2018 and naively thought that that would continue. I realised way too late that all the work I put in learning the trade would come to nothing, but went back to uni and am now in a post grad course to get out of this job. I hate it, but not because I hate the job itself (well, to be honest, I do), but I hate having to work under teachers who cannot view things outside the narrow lens of what they think is language teaching.

Anyway, in those years as the main teacher, I made many an observation relating to games and how they can affect students’ enjoyment of L2 acquisition.

One of these games is the Keyword Game. In the textbook version of this game, students are put into pairs and they try to take the eraser when the keyword is read out. It’s pretty simple. The problem is that if students are paired with someone with must faster reflexes, they often cannot score any points. This has a negative effect on students’ enjoyment of English, which is something we should be avoiding.

What I did was to have the students play the game in groups. So instead of pairs, they’d sit in a circle and put their erasers between them, hence they have an eraser on their left and their right, meaning they now have two chances to score a point. Granted this isn’t the perfect system, but in my observations, the prevalence of students scoring zero points vanished. 

I also integrated the target phrase into the game, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion.

Anyway, despite explaining my reasoning ad nauseum, teachers refuse to entertain this outside the box thinking.

I know why, I know that I just need to get out of this job, but I find it hard to enjoy the game as it is knowing and seeing kids often feeling disheartened at not being able to score points, hence affecting their enjoyment.

Thank you for reading my rant.

Does anyone have a copy of it? We much prefer that chant, the new ones are great but it would be awesome to have access to this particular one

On our next album, I'm including a ukulele ditty (still called "ukulele ditty" until the lyricist renames it), but I want only instruments on the song to be ukuleles. I don't have an 8-string, can't really afford one, so I'm hoping someone wants to help out to provide a fuller sound.

I write a lot of my songs initially on the ukulele and convert them to guitar for band use. There's even a band version of this song, but both versions will be on the album.

I can pay a small amount for your time. I live in Japan, so it needs to be in yen. If you use PayPal, it will convert it for you. We're doing this as a hobby and will probably make zero or minus money from this album, so again, I can't pay a whole lot. For context, for the full album, I paid the drummer 10,000 yen and will pay the singer 20,000 yen on completion (plus she will get 34% royalties should anything ever come of this album).

If you're interested, please feel free to DM me, and I will send you the link to the song (as to not promote myself here) and give you chords and whatever else you may need!

Long live the Ukulele!!