Ever had an awesome Chinese teacher?

[philipbeckwith]

Did you ever have and awesome Chinese teacher? What was awesome about her/him? What made you want to go to his/her class?

 

The reason I ask is I teach Chinese to middle and high school students in America.  I'm on summer break now, so I am starting to think about how to get even better next academic year.

 

Xiexie in advance!

[Shelley]

My second chinese teacher, whose classes I attended for about 6 years until she retired , was my best chinese teacher. It wasn't because her teaching skills were the best, she had a tendency to go off at a tangent, this was however usually very informative, interesting and enlightening.

 

The lack of sticking to her lesson plans were offset by her sheer passion for the chinese language and her desire to share her knowledge with you. You were sucked into her enthusiasm and knowledge.

 

Her actual teaching abilities were brilliant and the fact that she was British born in Shanghai in the 1930's and had to leave when the troubles began meant her Chinese was excellent as was her English so any explanations were understandable and clear.

 

If I could I would still be taking her classes now.

[philipbeckwith]

Thanks for your reply. You are so lucky to have had an enthusiastic teacher. I only had teachers in China. I had a blast because of the international vibe. I can't say any of the teachers projected enthusiasm for what they were doing though. I always wondered what it would have been like to learn for one of those super motivated, student centered teachers.

[JerryG11]

Yes! I had/have (kind of an off and on thing right now) with a Taiwanese teacher from kaohsiung city in Taiwan. She teaches in the US where I live, but I never would have been able to get as far as I have without her help. After her tutoring me for the past two years i'm approaching level 5 HSK which is way further than I thought I would ever get.

 

It's tough to give advice to you though cause it sounds like you don't have the ability to tutor 1 on 1 correct? It sounds like you have a huge class. What I could say is try to take time out of everyday to focus specially on each and every kid. Even if it's only for a couple minutes. They may have some question they were afraid to ask in front of the whole class and you taking that 2 minutes individually with them would help I'm sure. Or maybe you already do that though and if so keep on doing that! 

 

Good luck next semester

[philipbeckwith]

Not necessarily huge classes, but definitely not one-on-one either. You are right to remind me to never forget to give students some individual attention. It gets easy to look at the forest and forget the trees when so much is going on.

[johnk]

I attended a lot of Chinese classes. One teacher stood out. She was a temporary teacher while the 'real' teacher was on maternity leave.

Somehow she changed the class from being a very passive learning environment to being a very active debating class. We did do the normal stuff like grammar etc. but every week she would select a topic for discussion for the next week. Over half the class time would be for the discussion. People would come in with vocab lists and prepared arguments, key words would be written up on the whiteboard and there were some pretty intense debates (in Chinese).  Somehow she got everyone to participate and everybody's  Chinese level improved.

Unfortunately it only lasted one term.

[beckminster]

I've had a couple of awesome Chinese teachers. They all had pretty different teaching styles though, so it's hard to say what they had in common, aside from enthusiasm for the subject. The teacher I had for my first year of Chinese, and then again after coming back from China, studied Song ci and Tang shi, so we read a lot of poetry in his classes. Even Chinese 101, which was awesome. (送友人 by 李白 was used to explain why one of the characters in our textbook dialog had to 送 his friend to the train station.) Another teacher I had taught time order words by bringing a hot plate and wok to class, and cooking 柿子鸡蛋 for us. Humor is pretty key I think. You want the classroom environment to be loose enough to let the students feel okay laughing at themselves. 

Learning Chinese can be pretty frustrating even for people who are well past the beginner stage, so when I've taught Chinese I try to emphasize the importance of setting attainable goals (Ie, don't learn to read and write the characters if all you want to do is make small talk. You'll have plenty of time to learn them later if you decide you need to take your Chinese to the next level.) I also like to play lots of Chinese rock / folk music and other stuff they might have trouble finding on their own, and giving suggestions for movies and TV shows to watch. The more you listen to Chinese, the better feel you get for the intonations, even if you're reading subtitles in English. Or even better, if you have the subtitles off and don't have a clue what they're saying.

[philipbeckwith]

It does seem that giving kids something 'real' to do makes a big difference. Thanks for your input.