Leson Plan

Teacher

Daniel Chou

Interview an English teacher

The date of interview: 4/23/2007

Teacher’s name: Fong Lin Chang

School:

Quang
Yong
Junior High School

 

1.The teacher’s background:

  Before she becomes an English teacher in junior high school, she taught English from cram school called Joy English, where she learned many teaching skills and means and where she found she really loved teaching especially getting along with the students who always brought her much happiness, then she turned to teach in 福營Junior High, 民生Junior High, 重慶Junior High and now 光榮Junior High School. She has been teaching English in junior high school for 7 years except her teaching experience in the cram school.

2. What’s your belief and philosophy in teaching English?

      I think teaching methods can be manifold, and we can rarely point out which one is the fittest and most effective for us to teach or say which one will absolutely work the most. The rigidness or loose of a teacher’s teaching is just superficial, the most significant and eminent elements are the situation come from the cooperation between the teacher and students, which definitely can cultivate the students’ ability to learn more by themselves. Only by this kind of learning condition happen in class, will the students want to absorb more knowledge and realize how to apply the knowledge to the needed time. As far as I am concerned, the teacher can communicate with her students for illustrating her students in what way the class would proceed afterwards before the first class starts. And during this communication, the teacher can strongly recommend her students how to this subject and with what attitude to learn; also, the teacher is  supposed to have her students feel vicarious as the teacher do. By this way, most of the student can get their direction to learn and fully enjoy in the teacher’s class. On the other hand, I always believe that a teacher ought to join the students’ learning process with showing them a right direction, helping them with patience, communicating instead of scolding, providing them with what they really want and need, and above all never giving up any one then the students will get advanced step by step even though it happens slowly.

3. The barriers and supports the teacher faces in the teaching context?

    According to the educational doctrine, teacher sometimes can scarcely punish with seriousness the students who always make mistakes or ill-behavior on purpose. So as a teacher sometimes would get frustrated about what should she do to help them and correct their wrong conducts. Fortunately, supports always come in time from the school and the family; only by the communication and cooperation work between the school and the family will the teacher correct and help the students effectively and successfully.

4. What’s the most important change in the students who turn to grade nine from grade eight?

      Many students whose learning methods were easier and simpler when they were just a seventh or eighth grade sometimes can’t get themselves used to the brain new way of absorbing knowledge in grade nine. This is because when they turn to be a nine-grade student facing the pragmatic pressure of the impending examination which is powerful enough to change their own future, they sometimes will find out the attitude and methods of learning they had before can hardly help them to handle the overwhelming things which they have to know in order to tackle and pass the exam. Hence, some of them have the symptom of wrong learning behavior or giving up. About the wrong learning behavior I mentioned above is that students become used to reciting whatever they saw on the textbooks or reference books without any thinking about the knowledge why they must learn or recite; by this way, our students become only a vacuum cleaner without any digestion when they study. However, I don’t think it as students’ fault because why would those students do this and learn in this simple way is just because their teachers do that as well. To take a better class for example, the teachers leading those so-called the best classes will easily become blind to give their students much information about the subjects they teach, and under this situation, students have no time to classify and digest but only recite meaninglessly which do nothing better to our students. The more closed the exam is, the more students will take this measure to study. So if these students cannot be smart enough to use what the studying manner and methods they used to be, they will become merely a bookworm.

5. What could we do to help our students learn the knowledge happily and independently?

      Some teacher, especially the so-called famous teacher, will cram their students in the ninth grade so much information and knowledge away from the textbooks that their students would sometime feel frustrated about the dead knowledge called by me. Those poor students seem to be too overloaded to apply or to think why they have to learn the stuff; as a result, they are getting lazier and regarded in the long run. Those phenomena are easily seen particularly in grade nine. However, most of them were not like what they are, I still remember one of the students I taught in her eighth grade, she was full of energy and had a spectacular enthusiasm for learning new knowledge, and once she told me that what she had learned could help her to resolve the problems easily when she met the foreigner to ask some questions of her like asking directions etc. But now she seldom feels happy to learn new knowledge, cause the knowledge helps her not in her daily life but only on the test, so sometimes she feels she becomes a machine to write down the correct answer on the test only, and learning from this way ultimately turns to be a boring job for her. Do not make our students become the students I mentioned above. We as a teacher should do something effectively and meaningfully to help them. Any learning and studying, I think, should be encouraged and induced by teachers. Only when they meet their achievement and learn from it, will they know the true meaning of real learning. Learning motivation is the key for teachers to inspiring and spurring our students’ appetite for learning. How do we make our students have a great appetite for learning happily and independently is associated with the process of the interactive relationship between the teacher and students, instead the teacher dumps a lot of stuff and cram it into students’ brain. This is the crucial gist for leading them to learn happily and independently.

6. My reflection:

    Patience and love seem to be the necessary and indispensable characteristics to be a teacher; however, a nice teacher with these two important characteristics is not enough because I found in this interview with the teacher teaching skills and personal traits are rather crucial to affect the students whom he teaches. A teacher must try to change himself as a media to help students change themselves willingly. The students influenced by the teacher will be led to the better path and get better unconsciously than before.

Visiting Taipei Municipal Lishan Junior High School

    First I want to say thanks to Alice for giving us another precious opportunity to visit

Lishan
Junior High School. So far as I knew till my visiting
Lishan
Junior High School, I always regarded it as just a usual school as any other one in
Taipei but focuses on its sport profession – table tennis. Why do I say this, because Lishan Junior High is always famous to everyone’s memory by its prominent table tennis achievement. However, I was absolutely stunned by its English teaching when I saw the paper or essay written in English individually by those students who are just in grade nine.

This visiting to Lishan is great at large, but it was too bad that we each person only had a chance to observe and to join one class of them. To take myself for example,  I observed the English teacher called 呂琇年, though in the beginning, there was something wrong with her notebook, afterwards she taught the complicated   grammar very well especially when her answer was printed wrong on the screen but she still used someway to avoid embarrassment by calling the mistakes illusion which made us laugh loudly. In addition, the time of her teaching was controlled very well, too. For as soon as the ring stroke, she finished the content on time. About the content she taught was very clear and easy for the students to understand by her explanation of the differences between the two different grammatical usage. After my observation back to the visual classroom, I felt that I had wanted to observe the first class which some others of us observed at 9 o’clock. Generally speaking, in this visiting, I really learned a lot and knew something I hadn’t known before. For instance, I thought teaching by projector sometime was inappropriate, because it would pose the students feeling bored and be hard to make the student concentrate in class. But now I know how to keep the students abreast with the teacher step just only by some questions on handouts to reinforce students to catch and to pay attention on what the teacher is talking about. Via this interactive way between the teacher and the students, students would be afraid of omitting something important from the teacher’s lecture or being asked some questions then they now would learn faster, more efficient and more diligent than before. Therefore, I could combine the handouts with drawing lot to keep them more concentrated and better.