First Saturday Teaching

Saturday June 17-2006
This was my first day of a full weekend of teaching 8-hours plus parent meetings and preparations. It’s a good thing that I have several assistants to do the main work and all I have to do is deliver the material, keep the kids interested and familiarize myself with the text.

Each foreign teacher gets an assistant to help with translation, keep discipline in class, give and mark homework and prepare lesson plans. The foreign teachers need only to review and make changes to lesson plans presented to them.

The textbook(s) emphasize constant drilling to improve pronunciation but nothing can describe a 2-hour lesson with little kids who have to sit still most of the lesson. There is only a 10-minute break for the lessons, so to keep the kids from losing interest, teachers inject some fun with English word games like hangman and Simon says etc.

It’s quite tortuous for the youngest kids who may be as young as 6 years old.

No Pictures for now
I don’t know why but I cannot upload pictures anymore. Hopefully this can be fixed soon.

Corrections
1. The pizza place was in fact not a pizza hut, just a pizza place.
2. My buildings stairwells are lit with dim emergency lights, but the outer exits are completely unlit and would be considered hazards in the west.