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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Positive reviews

I'm happy to report that I've been getting a lot of favorable comments from students. I spoke to one student by name --Ingrid, an older woman--and she said with awe, "You remembered my name!". After one of my first classes, when I was still team-teaching, she had said to me (unsolicited) "You are an excellent teacher!"

We have 3 basic type of classes. One is the Workshop, which is the old-fashioned structure with the teacher up front and 25 students in desks. Another is Face2Face,where 4 students and a teacher are around a small desk and students are given much more opportunity to talk and receive personal feedback. We use Powerpoint for both of these. The third is English Corner, which takes place in the lobby and is designed to give students a chance to speak with each other at length in English while the teacher observes and helps as necessary. Each of these are on various topics each week.

Each student signs up for one workshop, 2 Face2Faces and one English Corner each week. When they sign up, however, they don't know which teacher they will have.

As I walked into class the other day, some students were already there in their desks, and one older woman said "Oh, it's you! I'm so glad. I like your teaching." A young woman asked me which classes I was teaching so she could try to sign up for them.

About 85% of our students are female, for some reason. The word is that some women see you (teacher, Westerner) as good husband material and possibly a ticket to the US. I'm not sure about that, though. A young male student said to me yesterday, "You see the class is full; everyone wants your class." Another young man said, "I like your teaching style very much."

I'd be interested in hearing the reaction of other teachers as to what to make of such comments in general. Are they buttering you up? We don't give or grade tests, so I doubt it's that. How can you tell if it's genuine? And I wonder how Chinese students differ from Western students with such comments, as well as the negative ones I mentioned in a previous post.

1 comment:

  1. You always fascinate me, so I doubt they are buttering you up. I would love to have you as a teacher.

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