Chinese Lesson

I had my first session of being tutored last Wednesday. I hired my friend Pei Xin to teach me. She is very good in English so I think she can understand every question I will have or things I want to learn. Right now I am just typing up some lesson plan ideas and sending them to her to form into something she can teach me.

Last time I reviewed things like I, you, she, he, we, them. How to say I am 'excited' or 'scared' or 'bored.' The days of the week... how to write my Chinese name properly... lot's of cool things!

I also recored my voice saying the words as I copied her prompts. I think It should all be pretty good and useful! I feel like if I keep doing this I can really improve quickly, but I guess we will see!

Also on another note I have been practicing playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo and I think I am improving at that as well. I hope when I go to play Street Fighter 4 in Kaohsiung that I can do well and not waste too many quarters!

Teacher Craig

Today my boss Tammy had me come in to observe one of the teachers in 3 of his classes. Each class was about 90 mins. Teacher Craig, as he is called, was super helpful, very nice, and very honest about his teaching style and theories. I think watching his classes really helped me get an idea of the flow of the class.

The Wells school has a strict lesson plan for each session. Craig was able to fit 5 - 7 activities into each class. That will help me with the pacing a lot, and I think thats one hard part of lesson planning. You have a certain amount of material, a certain amount of time, and you need to figure out how much time to spend on different segments.

It was also obvious between the different classes that the students make a huge difference in the way the class goes. Some classes are slow and take a lot of patience, others are quick and you can really see them learning and retaining knowledge. Some classes may even be too energetic and you would find yourself trying to keep everyone focused. It seems the pacing between exciting and more calm activities is really important. If the students can feel interested and happy then they will look forward to coming each session.

The teacher's aide can also be very important for keeping discipline and dealing with grading. It's also important to keep the language between teacher and student strictly in English. If the students realize they can talk to you in Chinese they will become lazy and less creative in trying to use their limited English to convey their thoughts.

So I think I learned a lot today. Tomorrow I need to watch another Teacher, Jen. I hope I can learn something different from seeing her style.