High School Teachers’ Meeting, May 5th-Shanghai High School International Division

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High School Teachers’ Meeting, May 5th

May 9, 2017

High School Teachers’ Meeting, May 5th

On Friday May 5th, the foreign teachers of SHSID’s High School gathered for their weekly meeting. Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Pickart began the meeting by covering the regular announcements, including the library cataloguing project, the Not Spelling Bee, the coming Dragon Boat Festival break, among other topics.

Following these announcements, Mr. Slonim gave his colleagues a quick unconventional lesson on the ‘Dynamic Interplay of Syntactical and Morphological Units ’. He used this deliberately impenetrable title as a prompt, asking the teachers to write their reaction to it on a slip of paper, and pass the slip forward. He then picked the funniest responses, wrote them on the board, and as a group the teachers analysed the way these responses used language to create an effect. For example, one teacher simply responded with ‘Ain’t got time’. The teachers noted that this sentence used brevity, informality, and an incomplete grammatical structure to create a sarcastic, humorous effect. The point of this exercise was to demonstrate how virtually any sentence/phrase/text can be analysed in the classroom to demonstrate the inner workings of language.

(Written by Mr. Angus Stewart Picture by Mr. Eric Cunningham)