Friends with benefits

I’ve been an English teacher for 11 years, since 2000 (anniversary coming up next January). When I started my career, the universally acclaimed series Friends had been around for about six years or so, and teachers the world over had been using their weekly adventures for years in their classes, which pretty much means I don’t know what it feels like to be an English teacher without constantly thinking about how to use a Friends episode to fit a class, or how to enrich a class using an episode. In other words, it is fair to say that Monica, Chandler, Ross, Rachel, Joey and Phoebe have been teaching with me, sort of illustrating the points I made in class, for… ever. Isn’t that what friends are for anyway?

The idea for this blog came from an old dream: I’ve always wanted to watch all the Friends episodes in order, and though I’ve had the seasons for years, I’d never actually gotten round to doing that due to a pervasive lack of time, laziness, House, my addiction to books and PS3, piles of homework collecting dust on my desk, students, workshops, Tricolor on TV, and other humdrum events of the daily grind. Yesterday, however, October 20^th, 2010 (an already historic date!), I actually got off my butt and put disc 1, season 1 in my laptop’s DVD player and embarked upon a journey which will in all likelihood take several months to be concluded (at the present rate of 4 episodes a day – which is how many I watched yesterday – it would take me a bit under two months; but that, of course, only if I didn’t have the habit of mixing up pleasure and work so often).

Along with the decision of watching all of the 236 Friends episodes, seasons 1 to 10, in the order they were created, came the idea of watching them all with a teacher’s eye, and for every episode watched, try and create at least one TESOL video activity to use with my students. I must confess I found (and still find) that a pretty neat idea, and how I went from that to deciding to blog about it isn’t really rocket science.

That all being decided and regardless of how excited I am and eager to jump right in it with two feet, the question which now poses itself is: How to share the activities? I’m no stranger to blogging, but I have never actually shared files online, and I’m still looking for the best way to do that (I am, by the way, open to suggestions from potential readers-to-be), but I believe activities will start popping up in the next week or so. Creating the activities is going to take careful analysis of the episodes, watching a few of them more than once – at least parts of them twice or three times – and actually putting pen to paper. Nevertheless, the way I visualize what is going to be made available here in the next several months is something like:

-          activities for skills practice (Listening and Speaking, especially, but also Reading and Writing);

-          activities for grammar presentation and practice;

-          activities on culturally relevant aspects portrayed in the episodes;

-          activities for pronunciation practice;

-          Warm-up, Lead-in (to various topics) and filler activities;

-          …

I take the opportunity here, by the way, right from the word go, to ask for your participation. If you have any Friends activities you’ve created and tested lying around, please send them to me. You will obviously be fully credited for them, even if I (at my discretion) end up making alterations to them. Also, since all the activities shared here on the blog will be in editable format, you can also feel free to change and adapt my (or any of my contributors’) activities as you see fit.

That’s it! Thank you for visiting, make a habit of it, and please leave your valuable and encouraging comments and critiques when you drop by. They’ll all be taken into careful consideration.