Observing Lessons 听课
Today I observed another fellow’s lesson. A newbie as he is,his passion and vitality is what I pretty much envy. Counting him in, I have sitted in on no less than 10 teachers’classes up to now.It is beyond doubt that I have learnt a lot from these observations.
In gerneral, you need make a special appointment with the teacher you wanna observe. It’s also ok you go to his or her office during the break between 2 classes—-Normally, they agree on the spot.These teachers are just so amiable,easy-going and confident－－－more than glad to show their authentic and natrual teaching styles. Nevertheless, they are rather modest,insisting you should leave some advice after the class ended. Through this blog,I wanna make a review of the lessons observerd in the past 3 months.
The fellows I observed were more than meticulous in imparting their knowledge, not only orally but also on the chalkbord. Occasionally,they cracked a reserved joke to liven up the tedious class. Most of them had the relaxing expressions and soft eye contacts with the students. "Any questions?" is the sentence I heard the most in the observations.
The students. Yes, the students were the most attentive in the world. Especially the girls. Hitting the books means almost everything to them. According what I saw, these lovely and honest kids kept joting and joting for fear they would miss any single word.Infrequently, sporadic responses were heard, which was probably the only interaction.
Yes, it was far from an interactive or dinamic classroom, bringing me to 20 years back—–shockingly familiar. Basically,there is no communication in classes between teachers and students, nor was there among the students themselves. Maybe the teaching pattern was suitble for the local situation.That’s why in such atmosphere, I didn’t see the expected boredom but their hunger for learning.They were just so easy to please—–All too often,a silght digression from teachers was enough to relax or stimulate these lovely kids.
To top that off, I made a rough estimation about TWO TIMES in the clasrooms—one is the speaking-english time and the other is student-speaking time in a 40-minute class. The former was around 10 minutes,of which 99% was spent in reading aloud the materials. The latter was miserablely little 5 minutes or so, of which nearly zero was speaking English in the real sense. To be a teacher-centered class or a student-centerd class, that’s a question.The both are hard.
That said, I am by no means targeting something or somebody in this post cause I DO have the same problem here. Instead, I respect my fellow teachers and their teaching strategies. I like the local kids and their never-ending fighting moral. I only wanna seek a possibillty on how to hit two birds with a stone. That is, can we make our students smarter in learning English, in a more efficient way?
