Crappy day yesterday

Well, yesterday was a pretty crappy day with regards to teaching. I typically have problems with my first class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The class in the morning and has four students all around 20 or so. One student always manages to look bored and pass work off onto another student to do when they are doing pairwork. He's pretty sharp, but definitely kind of annoying. Anyway, I tried to do a pronunciation activity to work on the pronunciation for the simple past. What a disaster. None of them could really do it, and one of them even told me "Teacher, this is boring!" What a start to the morning.... I'll take some responsibility for that failure though because of poor presentation on my part to the students. They can't do what they don't understand, and what they don't understand is sure to be boring. Sounds like my engineering classes.... Anyway, to finish off the day I taught my students the second conditional and tried to have them use it in an activity. Sad to say, none of them used the target language. They got close, but I didn't hear a single correct sentence. What's frustrating is that these students have been reviewing this material for the last 2 classes! Yeesh! However, they were happily using vocabulary words I had taught them for a reading text. Too bad none of those words are going to be on the exam. Sigh.... Start over and back to basics. This weekend should be fun because it's a holiday weekend to celebrate the Annexation of Guanacaste, a province here. I'm planning on heading out there with some other teachers, so hopefully a little time in the sun should heal any bruised egos.