Talking to colleagues about teaching is like spontaneous professional development sessions. I love to hear what they say. How their ideas inspire me to develop my own teaching techniques and classroom activities!
It all started as a textbook discussion. Then, the thing that plagues a lot of us came up: Should we pin the yin, when and how? My colleague spends a considerable amount of time on pinyin before introducing characters when she teaches high school students; but start both at the same time with the younger students (middle grades, elementary). She noticed that when she teaches pinyin and introduced characters at the same time, her students do not learn their pinyin and tones quite as well. However, she shared a great activity which seemed to help her students with pinyin and kept up their interest level -- she used all the 'problematic' pinyin in an interesting dialogue and had students act it out.
Last year, for my non-heritage students at NHCLS, I taught mostly by sound (listening and speaking), and added some simple characters for the kids to start appreciating this different writing system. I wanted them to be familiar with the sounds, and be able to learn the pronunciation like native kids, before teaching them how to pinyin. We spent one whole year without pinyin.
Now, in their second year, I am going to put my pilot class to test and see if they really will learn pinyin in a flash. They will get their dialogue in pinyin, and they will already understand a big part of it. This is very exciting. The new school year is when we put all our planning to work. Test your hypothesis!
Monday, August 20, 2012
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Revitalize Thy School!
Chinese schools as we know them, are heritage schools which cater to students whose parents are from a Chinese-speaking part of the world. In our case, Taiwan. As Taiwanese immigration into the New Haven area slows in the past years, we no longer have a robust population of Taiwanese families who are looking to send their children to heritage schools. With no advertisement nor additional promotion in any form, we were lucky to still exist thanks to all the loyal families who still send the babies of their families to our school.
This June, with a colleague from the school, we called a meeting inviting parents and teachers who are returning, to put their heads together to find a way that will enable the survival of our heritage school. Majority of the attending parents have kids in my class (the only language class for the non-heritage speakers). It seems obvious that we need to open up our heritage school to the non-native Chinese-speaking population. With my colleague and I who teach in mainstream schools, it's a no-brainer that we should welcome and include the non-native population, and develop a curriculum for this track.
On promoting the school, the parents really came through when we were putting out flyers, bouncing emails around for ideas, deciding on administrative procedures, and a teacher who's no longer with us also helped out in a huge way. I was so impressed with everybody. Their enthusiasm for their children's Chinese language education is what keeps me going at that school.
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