My Valuable Experience
Anna(周立晖)
Being an English teacher for 14 years, I have got my opportunity to participate in the English Teachers Class and Students Summer Camp. When I was told that I should come to the training class, I felt I was lucky but not so happy. Because I should spend 1/3 of my summer holiday on it. I wouldn’t have as much time for relaxation and travels like my colleagues. However, when I am being in the training class, I enjoy it so much that I really don’t want it to come to an end. It is really valuable for my teaching as well as for my life. I have learned a lot from the training class.
Anna(周立晖)
Being an English teacher for 14 years, I have got my opportunity to participate in the English Teachers Class and Students Summer Camp. When I was told that I should come to the training class, I felt I was lucky but not so happy. Because I should spend 1/3 of my summer holiday on it. I wouldn’t have as much time for relaxation and travels like my colleagues. However, when I am being in the training class, I enjoy it so much that I really don’t want it to come to an end. It is really valuable for my teaching as well as for my life. I have learned a lot from the training class.
In the first week, I had some lectures given by the American teachers from Huntington University. First, Jeff’s lecture “English Communication Competency in the 21st Century” made me realize how important English is . He used a lot of data and important facts which I would like to use to make my students clearly understand that English is becoming the most widely used language in the world. I’m sure they will pay great attention to English study and do better in it . And we teachers need to improve our teaching abilities to be great helpers of the students.
And then from Luke’s performence, I not only learned how the students could achieve success in English, but also the key aspects of Chinese /American cultural differences. And from Valerie, I learned many new ideas about how to teach oral English lessons in the communicative approach, and how to make a lesson plan which should include 8 elements, i.e., objectives, materials needed , warm-up, presentation, 3 practices and closure. Susie gave us some wonderful lessons about Multiple Intelligence Theory. She demonstrated her skills by making the classroom full of laughters.
During the 2nd and 3rd weeks, the American teachers demonstrated how they interacted with students by getting them to dance, sing English songs, play games, etc, like they do in their own classrooms, which enabled our students to practise speaking English all the time. Their smiles, encouragement, enthusiasm greatly impressed both us teachers and the students. Here in the camp, we found major differences between American way of teaching and traditional schooling in China . In our classroom, it is teachers-centred, while the American way of teaching is students-centred. To meet the new standard curriculum, we have found communicative approach is more and more popular with and practical to the students. Here, the Americans vividly showed us how they teach, which is very useful and helpful to my teaching, I think.
Actually, in the two lessons I taught in the camp, I used what I had learned from the American teachers to design my lesson plans. I found my lessons were better than before. My instructor, Errin’s advice and observation notes helpd a lot for my teaching improvement.
For three weeks, I have been cherishing every opportunity to learn from the American teachers. I enjoyed every free talk with special themes to talk about. In fact, in the free talk, both we Chinese teachers and the Americans learned a lot from each other. It’s a good chance to practise my oral English and to know about American culture. After 4:00pm every day, when most of the Chinese teachers had gone home, I stayed to have another talk with one or two American teachers about the essays given to us before hand. We talked about essays. We talked about life. We talked about poems. I really felt grateful to them.
What impressed me most was their teamwork and hard work. They worked very hard together to make everything wonderful and successful.
The 3-week training class and summer camp is very valuable to me, I think. I enjoyed every moment. I enjoyed every lecture. I enjoyed every game. I enjoyed every talk. I enjoyed every song, except “A Goodbye Song”. You know, guys, I really don’t want to say goodbye to the American teachers and to the training class. If I have to, I would love to sing “Friends Forever” to them. Just as Luke said, “Allow me to be friends with you, forever”. I will keep all of you in my mind. I will sow the seeds of love, friendship, and culture, which I think is the most important in my camp experience ,to my colleagues and students.
