299 is Sexy: Kisdobos' 299 blog

Dear All!

Welcome to Kisdobos' 299 site! I'm going to keep this blog throughout the semester for you who are enrolled in the course. Before telling you more about the blog, let me first say a few words about the course itself.



About the course

The course was developed by me, and this is the third semester I am doing it. So far, the ratio of my students passing the 299 exams, oral and written, in the semester of the course, is 100 %.

There are 15 classes throughout the semester, so the course lasts for 15 weeks. Each class is 90 minutes long. The location is at a Budapest café 5 minutes from the university. The course material is a balanced selection of material for oral and written preparation, although much of the oral preparation also serves the purpose of improving your writing skills. The classes offer a practical hands-on approach to perfecting your skills in discussions and argumentative essays with plenty of creative and real-life tasks.

We start writing essays in the last third of the course. The approach we're taking is first we refine separately the set of skills needed to be proficient in argumentative essays and academic-type discussions, and only then are we going to set out to write essays. The number of essays you'll get to write and get back corrected is 4. It is only up to you whether you use all of these opportunities.

Here's the course schedule for Fall 2007:

 

Class 1. Debatable and non-debatable statements

Class 2. Taking a stance

Class 3. Refining thesis statements

_{Class 4. Agreeing and disagreeing}

Class 5. Finding the thesis, supporting arguments, conclusion in a model essay

_{Class 6. Showing both sides of the story}

_{Class 7. Constrasting connectives}

Class 8. Generating your own thesis statements from texts

Class 9. Writing an argumentative essay based on an article

Class 10. Writing introductions

Class 11. Writing conclusions

Class 12. Complaint letters and resulting connectives

Class 13. Application letters

Class 14. Taboo words: using more sophisticated vocabulary

Class 15. Mock exam

About the blog

As a follow-up to each class I'm going to post new entries on the class blog, including the in-class material, as well as dozens of model essays, practice exercises and vocabulary lists. The course blog is an interactive learning platform: my respected colleague, the robot teacher, is going to correct your answers, so you can check yourself clicking on the 'Comments' section of a particular entry. That's where you'll find the complete text of the model essays, too.

The 'Improving your essays' type of entries feature your essays written for the course. I'm going to underline your mistakes, and you can check the corrections in the 'Comments' section.

The new entries always come on the top of the page for the sake of your convenience. This way, the earlier classes can be found at the bottom of the page.


Wishing you the best,
Kisdobos



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About Kisdobos:


Kisdobos is 28 years old, and has just graduated with MA's in English and Teaching from ELTE. He taught Language Practice 1 and 2 at ELTE in two consecutive semesters as a teaching assistant. In 2005-2006 he spent two academic semesters at Trinity College, Connecticut, USA as the grantee of the prestigious Kellner Scholarship. At Trinity he specialized in improvisational acting, which also served as the topic of his MA thesis, and serves to this day as the daily inspiration for his teaching. In the academic breaks and in the summer he was a volunteer for The Common Ground Collective, a grassroots relief organization, in the hurricane-struck city of New Orleans. Now he has his own language teaching enterprise and works as a freelance teacher in Budapest. Among his satisfied clients are elementary school children, university students and company headmen and employees.