Pet Cockroaches anyone?

This news article gives me a mixture of good and bad feelings. It's mainly good because the students just love to discuss cockroaches, especially as terrors of their apartments and houses. The bad part is the creepy photograph of a gigantic cockroach in full color. I'm just not a big fan of these insects.

So, we were going through the article with mixed reactions from the students. On the one hand, one of the men looked fascinated with the topic. On the other, his classmate looked like she was losing her appetite for dinner. But despite their rather extreme reactions to the subject matter, they still managed to get quite a lot out of this lesson. After they had taken turns reading the article, we went through the new vocabulary. There were a handful of new words to be explained and after this was done, we moved onto the questions. This took a bit of time because the students had to look back through the article to find the answers, and occasionally rephrase things. Overall, they did a good job of thoroughly answering the questions with the appropriate answers.

At the end, we discussed the pros and cons of having these gigantic cockroaches as pets. The female student insisted that regardless of how the article had hyped these insects, she would never consider keeping one as a pet. She stood by her feelings of how cockroaches were dirty and creepy and gave her the shivers just to think of them. Her classmate was quick to jump at the opportunity to keep this type of cockroach as a pet, saying that it would be a fun experiment for him. He was interested to see what the differences were between regular cockroaches and gigantic ones.

At Smith's School of English Kyobashi, having such interesting articles like this one is great because it sparks conversations and encourages the students to have their own opinions.