April's ideas

April responded to my previous email and she has outlined three important things that she would like to explore in her working/teaching environment. And this is what I sent her:

April,

This is good. Can you post this to our yahoogroup, Taiwanese yahoogroups and perhaps our invited teacher trainers, Arnold and elizabeth will share their ideas and opinions.

The topic, "How do kids really learn?" is quite broad. Maybe we could be specific about it. Learning- which skill are we talking about? There should also be a criteria or performance rubric to see how the students' ability have improved. For example, in reading, you could give a new reading material and ask the students to read it. See how many they know or don't know. Do it for a week or two and check again. See how many words have been learned and retained. If you put your observation in a table it would be easier to see the improvements. Which language skills are you interested in? Let me know and I'll give you a list of activities that could help you in your class.

Cheers.

Aiden

april wrote:
Dearest Aiden: Hi! How are you today? I think about some issue are related to teaching such as 1.how to communite with the parents-- I know most of the parents are too busy so they don't know how the English teacher teaches their childern and what do the kids learn, how much do they really leaen at the cram school? Some parents think they pay the money and the English teacher should take the whole responsobility for teaching.I mean if the kids don't learn English well, it would be the teacher's problem.2. How to have a good relationship with your coworker?3.Sholud the experienced teacher train the new teacher?--I know most of the teachers don't want to share their teaching mothod with the new teacher beacuse they think if I teach you how to teach the kids, maybe I will be replaced some day. I don't want to share the experience with anybody because "that" is my tool to survive in the area(at the cram school). I think those problems are happening to me in the past one month. I am still learning and I often question myself how to be a good teacher?