Gao Laoshi's Teaching Blog

Further proof of the hurdles that middle school teachers face everyday. I had a new Chinese song to teach students which I made an animated video for. I played the song for 6th graders in the morning and it was a huge success. Later in the afternoon, I tried the exact same song and video with 7th graders. Students who were just one year older sat there with blank stares on their faces wondering what this dumb song was, that was the impression I got from them anyway. For the 6th graders, I had the song playing as they were walking into class and most of them instantly began automatically singing along as they came into the classroom. The 7th graders came in and just sat down, not sure what to think.

This may have something to do with what I’ve read about language acquisition being more difficult after puberty. The pre-pubescent students just do while the post-pubescent students need to think about what it is they are doing. Since singing a song in a foreign language has more to do with acquisition than with language, and I initially provided no instruction, these academically-oriented 7th graders perhaps were confused as to what they should be doing.

After 3 years of teaching middle school, it’s also clear to me that 7th grade is when some students begin their “too cool for school” phase. To some of the 7th graders’ credit, a few did start singing and dancing when I encouraged them. One of the 7th graders danced in front of the class to the song. I hope to be able to find ways to bring out this lack of shyness in all of my post-pubescent students someday.

Something magical happened today. I’ve been adopting some of Ben Slavic’s TPRS techniques the past two weeks, specifically “word association” and “word chunks.” The word chunks involves teams each trying to score points by figuring out the meaning of the chunk. I’ve been awarding points to winning teams, etc. and trying to come up with rules. I discovered I’m really bad at this, and the students are much, much, much, much more concerned about their team’s points than I am. I know the points really aren’t the point of the lesson (no pun intended) but to the students, they are everything.

Today in a 7^th grade class, I don’t know if I was just in a silly mood or was tired of all the competitiveness going around at the expense of learning, but I just said, “The first team who gets this question right gets 80 points!” This came as a big shock considering I’d never given more than two points in a single instance in the past. I did end up awarding the winning team 80 points, much to the disbelief of all the other teams.

At this point, I had grown beyond tired of deciding what answers were worth what points. So I told the teams, you decide how many points your team deserves for your answer, in Chinese! One team told me “shi bei” trying to say “10 hundred” but instead I wrote “10 cups” on the board, which is closer to what they actually said. Another team said “jiu ba” and I accordingly wrote “bar” beneath their name instead of the “900” that they wanted. Other teams were good with awarding themselves an appropriate actual number, but that didn’t seem to matter.

The amazing part of all of this, they were no longer concerned about how many points they had, and they were learning at the same time! Nobody cared (too much) who was winning.

At the end of the game, the final score awarded was “20 girlfriends.” I think I’m going to like this new system.

Over the past year or so, I’ve gotten pretty good at creating stories. It’s all the other stuff that I’m finding difficulty with these days, activities  that revolve around the story. Assignments, assessments, various activities etc. What works for other people?

This may be old news for some folk, but I learn over and over again just how important it is to use actors and some type of props when asking the story. Writing the story on the board is not enough, even after establishing meaning.

With a group of 6^th graders today, I began introducing new vocabulary and writing a story on the board, and maybe a third of the class was successfully following along. While I originally intended to make it simply a reading activity, they were dropping like flies and I had to do something to engage them and in a hurry.

I pulled up some actors from among the class and told the story I had just written on the board, having them act it out and doing TONS of circular questioning to reinforce it.

I keep a box of fake food in front of my classroom. The best part came when I took a departure from my originally-planned story and instinctually grabbed a hamburger out of the box of food. The hamburger became part of the story and I was passing back and forth between the actors based on the questions.

This hamburger not only contributed to the story in a linguistic way, but became a visual “hook” and turned a classroom of students, most of whom were not paying attention and following along to my liking, to a force of completely-engaged individuals who were following along and answering questions about the story with great fluency.

Yesterday I learned (or rather re-learned) that when a lesson goes amazingly well for one class of students, you cannot duplicate that lesson exactly and expect the same results with another group of students. A period of TPR Storytelling in one of my morning classes went so well, I thought I was well on my way to developing a magic formula. Trying to teach the same thing to a different class just two periods later without regard for whom I was teaching was doomed from the start.

This all seems to go back to knowing your students and feeding off the dynamic of each classroom, a skill I believe just as essential (if not more) in teaching.

In other news, I think I’ve developed a layout on my smartboard that is conducive to TPRS storytelling. It looks as if the key is splitting it into two different pages with the vocabulary on one side (with English where necessary) and the actual written story (with no English) on the other. I’ll post an example when I have a chance.

Sometimes I think I overcomplicate things too much and my teaching ends up suffering. Case in point, I taught five different classes today of different levels. For two of them, I tried to design an activity centered around PQA that had nothing to do with storytelling. Needless to say, these classes went horribly.

Two of my other classes I used scripted stories and did some PQA related to the stories. These went much better and both the students and I had a great time.

While I don’t want to always use the scripted stories (I want to get more involved in “asking” stories), this still seemed like a good way to go, since despite being in class for a couple months, the students are still very much beginners.

It’s a Sunday night and I’m multi-tasking by watching the Simpsons and blogging at the same time. My plan is post some of my own materials and methods while developing methods for teaching Chinese with TPRS.  For starters, here are some charts I spent most of today making for helping to learn Chinese radicals Chinese Radical Posters

If you would like to use the materials I’ve created in your own class, please feel free. Most of the graphics I created myself. None of the images I did use are copyrighted to my knowledge. All I ask is you don’t alter them in any and drop me a quick message to let me know what you’re using it for, mostly so I can keep track of what works and what doesn’t.

It’s been exactly two months since my last post! Yikes! I need to get my blog on more. I want to focus this post on tools, etc. I have discovered and found recently will work well for teaching.

Update 1: I discovered two new Chinese tools that I like. One is called dimsum and works for reading Chinese website and has a lot of other great little features that just make life easier for the Chinese teacher or learner. The other is called Pablo, which is a dictionary and one of the most comprehensive dictionaries I have seen. You can look up by English, Chinese, strokes, radical, even draw the character with your mouse. It gives you definitions and animated stroke order. Works a little bit better for C-E that E-C. You can download both as zip files and use them even if you’re offline. BOTH OF THESE APPLICATIONS ARE FREE DOWNLOADS!

Update 2: I’ve heard of danwei.org before, but never got into it, until now! Check out danwei.tv for some great non-mainstream TV programs about China. I found the one on Antiwave particularly interesting.

Update 3: There is an online Chinese TV show being billed as “China’s First Interactive Web Series.” I don’t know too much about it, as I stumbled across it by accident but started watching it and took a liking. The show is called “Yeah” and is my latest guilty pleasure. So much so that I started translating the subtitles for the first episode. You can see my work here. If you noticed anything that I may have not gotten quite right, please feel free to comment on it.

I’m hoping it won’t be another two months before posting again. Getting more comments may help inspire!

高山

Hey, I don’t think I’ve written a post since Startalk ended, but wanted to start again. Right now, I’m doing my second summer for Wisconsin’s Critical Language Fellows program for Chinese teacher to get trained in language teaching methodologies. It’s great. Also, after everything I’ve learned, I was able to create a wiki for the class here. Not a lot of classmates are using it yet, but one of the reasons is they haven’t had a whole lot of time to learn HOW to use it, but I’m hoping that will change in the next few weeks.

A few other quick notes: Google Reader is a great way to read someone’s blog without actually going to someone’s blog, and it’s easy to set up. Just google it. Haha.

I have seen the light, and now joined the gmail club. It seems like it will be a real easy way to keep track of my other existing e-mail account as well. You can send me an e-mail at:

braylaoshi (at) gmail (dot) com

“gaoshan” and “gaolaoshi” were both already taken, if you can believe that.