HAPPY TEACHER'S DAY, Rainbow ~

Everytime I talk about Rainbow with several of my teacher-to-be friends, I feel honored and proud. I'm honored that I can work with such an animated, diligent and open-minded teacher and I'm proud that I can always express myself freely ^0^. Unlike what I had anticipated, I'm looking forward to coming to this practicum every day (so far, because the administrative load is not heavy yet) because I enjoy watching you teaching and having discussion with you, not to mention that I really learn a lot from the observation and discussion. Thank you, Rainbow.

9/21 The Class Fund Issue --- what if it's stolen

Don't hasten to make a decision if the problem isn't easy to be solved. In a situation such as the class fund and S's personal belongings like electronic dictionary were stolen, Ts can let the Ss discuss first and see what solutions Ss would propose. Ts are not bound to compensate Ss' loss by donating extra money to the class fund. If the problem isn't serious, Ss are supposed to have the ability to make a proper decision. If the problem isn't easliy solved, then Ts might need to intervene. Give the victim's parents a call to make sure the parents understand the situation and to help the S more or less avoid parents' scolding. Sometimes it's a lesson Ss need to learn that they should be responsbible for their valuable possessions while they're out of the classroom.

9/22 The Excitement Prevails

Now I understand why Rainbow and Ms. Chiu always look energetic. I never see you take a nap in the office. Teaching is exhausting, but for some reason, the awareness of making the prepared materials useful in class triggers a sense of excitement that keeps the brain running and running. It's like even you feel tired but you can't sleep well... I really benefit a lot from Rainbow's suggestion for arranging the slides. She suggests me making the contents of each slide simple and clear. Instead of showing the whole text at once, releasing the information step by step not only makes it easier for Ss to follow but also acts as a reminder of what I'm going to say next. From today's teaching experience, I also learned that when designing an activity, don't be too greedy. Given around 5 minutes in class for group discussion, Ss aren't able to digest too many tasks at once. Take this 'Taiwanese Snacks' activity for example, asking them to make at least six sentences and create an English name for three foods respectively is nearly beyond their limits. Nevertheless, their creativity has added more excitement to this activity. ^0^ Hope everything will be just fine tomorrow.

9/14 Vocab in Lesson Two

Taiwanese Ss are used to heavily rely on what the teacher or cram schools prepare for them. Guiding Ss to check new words and find important usage or phrases in the dictionary is a very good way to help them learn on their own. Karen (昭芬老師) used to ask us to do the same thing. In the past when less teaching materials are offered by the publisher, such as the vocab quiz. Karen would ask us, each of us to design a ten-question vocab quiz (filling in the blank) by using the sentences we found in the dictionary. Although the quality of the quiz might be slightly uneven due to individual effort and individual point of view about which ten are the most important words in a new lesson, the challenge of making a quiz on our own and the uncertainty of which version we would get push us to make more efforts to preview and review the vocab.

9/15 A Small Tip for being a home teacher

Everytime a student asks for a day off, make a call to understand what happenes. :)

9/7 The Activity of Replying Letters

Before doing this activity, Rainbow asked Ss to preview the letters. Using the short reply as a model, Ss (four in one group) are required to invent a letter for Davis or 'Mary', the girl who wrote the famous Dear John Letter. I think the idea of letting Ss choose topics is good because different Ss with different personality or different proficiency levels might favor different topics. And two topics can also yield more diversed responses than one. The idea of writing a letter to 'Mary' is brillant. Originally, John is the person who needs Dulcie's advice. Instead of comforting a heart-broken veteran, students are asked to write the letter from John's perspective, and many creative responses are presented (laughter, too ). Surprisingly, no group presented a gloomy John; almost every John was described as a dandy or even gay. Every John said congratuations to Mary as conceited as he could. Well, it seems that nobody wants to give John an image of victim.
Ss not only practice speaking but also writing becasue they need to write down the letter before presentation. Also, this activity helps them get familiar to the reading text before the thorough explanation in the next hour. From their responses, Ss enjoyed this activity very much!

9/7 Volunteers!

It is not easy to have Taiwanese students volunteer in class. In order to create an atmosphere of volunteering or to motivate Ss to volunteer, assigning a higher motivated student to volunteer in class in advance is one way. Another is to praise the behavior of volunteering, conveying the message that volunteering in class is highly valued. Sometimes when the example is set, Ss might find volunteering not that frightening. I think volunteering is a very important element of learning atonomy and active learning. Apart from language teaching, such positive attitude of learning should be emphasized as well.

9/3 The Vocab and the Warm-Up for a New Lesson

The improvised warm-up before playing the game of "See, I Remember" is a good one. After the holistic explanation from teacher's lecture, Ss are excited about interacting with each other. I can see that most of them are having a good time throwing Chinese definitions and replying English new words to each other. The game, as Rainbow said, is a transition to link the vocab and the text. It is also a round-up to finish the section with, again, repetition that helps students recognize the vocab more easily. This is new to me and I think playing a short game or doing a brief activity as an ending of one section is a very good idea. The role-play done by the two students would be more impressive if they could have spoken louder.But Ss found it new and interesting, and those two who did the role-play were thrilled by the assignement. I found the slide made from Inspiration not only useful but also very helpful for students when they were required to brainstorm the situation and create a story based on that. This helps them generate the ideas and provide clues they might have missed from Ss' role-play. Ss were excited about the activity and little Chinese was used. ^0^ Rainbow did a thorough research on the survey of Ss' background. In preparation for the class meeting, she noted down those who expressed that they have other talents, for example, art or language and used this information as a back-up in case no one wants to volunteer for the class chores such as classroom decoration. She also noted down those who expressed they have interests in English. When the individual reponse is not satisfying and the classroom atmosphere goes 'cold', these students might be the saviors for better class management. Both the hard work and preparation are for better management of the class. They are tips that will be very useful for me and the endenvor of preparation is the spirit I need to inherit.

The Mirror has been polished!

Today I introduced myself to two classes. In the first class, students had little response to my little speech. The only response is to remind me that I should speak louder. Then, no anticipating little faces but only some warm smiles and blank stars. In the second class, I became a bit of nervous and didn't really follow the script I noted down in advance. This time, Rainbow helped me elicit students' interests and questions about me, which turned out to be pretty exciting. I found that behind those warm smiles and blank stars, students have lots of questions and anticipation for the new teachers, but they're afraid to ask questions and probably they're not used to ask questions. At this moment, instead of staring back with an awkward smile, teachers can serve as a facilitator, motivating students to brainstorm and speak their questions outloud. Rainbow taught 8 vocab today. I like the idea of picking up the most important or frequently used phrases as supplements and explaining them with sentences in real life situations. Most of the supplemental language usages are drawn from the examples in the vocab section, which is good for students because the supplements will not become a burden that scares students away from senior high school English and the repetition can help them memorize those new expressions more easily. The clear explanation with Rainbow's lively body language also help reinforce students' recognition of the new words; sentence-making that is linked to Ss' experiences helps give dead language patterns a live body as well. When teaching the new vocab, Rainbow would ask individual student to read the sentence outloud. I think it's a good way to make sure students are following teachers' instruction and to help them with unfamiliar pronunciation. However, the noise the AC and the ceiling fans produce make students' mumbles difficult to be heard. I'm afraid those who can't hear might find the noise distracting. Maybe next time when the AC is on, the ceilinng fans can be turned off. The situation might be better.

One other thing I learned from today is when going to see Ss' morning or noon self-study, always leave from the opposite direction, that is, leave from behind Ss' backs. In that way, Ss won't be sure whether the teacher is still there or not, which can creat some apprehension among Ss. Another is to make sure how far we teach in the textbook. Teachers might leave a bad impression if they don't know where to start teaching in the next class.