Day 4 -- Teacher Training program

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Another day older....another day teaching...another day learning. We covered 'presenting structures' today...I presented a formula (which I usually don't like to do but thought it's probably the best route to take in training teachers, r ight?) My formula? Well, I walked through what I would normally do in teaching grammar explicitly...1) demonstrate the structure in a meaningful way to form an association with the meaning; 2) write the structure on the board and bring the students' attention to the form; 3) Make a couple of examples with the structure; 4) generate language to create new examples (brainstorming vocabulary or situations, for example) with the class (also to draw on language that they already have/know); and finally to provide opportunities for meaningful practice to use the structure so that all students will have a chance to develop their ability to use their knowledge about the language. I demonstrated with several structures, including comparatives, formulaic expressions, and a favorite lesson that Caleb Gattegno passed on to a group in a workshop -- presentation of future with be going to, present continuous, and past tense in a sequence of actions...I love that lesson...The presentation worked very well and then we began to look at their textbooks and they worked in pairs to prepare a presentation of a structure to the class. The last hour was teacher presentations, as we have set up the schedule. The new element was a peer critique and feedback after each presentation. This was I think new and interesting and they began to learn more and more from each other. All in all it was a good morning. The afternoon was like a 100 yard dash to the finish line...with one of the interns I threw together a bingo game...using all the strucxtures as the squares int he bingo cards and creating sentences in which each structure was used to draw and call out. All in all it was a good experience and some teachers were familiar with and had used bingo already...not too much of a problem in explaining how to play....afterwards we did some pronunciation exercises and finallly viewed the end of a book with audio about Taro, a new boy at school who gets lost in Jackson Heights...it was a good way to end the afternoon.

An added treat today was my English lesson. Two young women in my class who are quite good in English volunteered to give me a Chinese class and so I left the hotel early and walked to the school to meet them -- the school was locked and they live nearby so we walked to their apartment and we started a Chinese lesson. It was really a good experience. Chinese is an incredibly difficult language and I wonder if I'll ever be able to learn it but I'm going to at least try to get into it. It'll be a good experience to work with actual teachers of language. I have found in the past that working with someone who knows the language and how to teach language makes a big difference. So far we have learned some vocabulary (pencil case and pen) and "Please could you give me a bowl/glass of water?" and Please could you clean my room? Please could you wash my coffee pot?" Good morning/afternoon/evening...and the order of writing the strokes in Chinese characters...I'mstill working on the tones...I sometimesccannot hear the differences nor can I always perceive the rising vs. the falling-rising....It seems that I need to pronounce each syllable very clearly and with a lot of stress but I have yet to figure that out. I am beginning to understand that there is a basic word order that is like English -- svo -- however there are very strange syntactical combinations that do not resemble English at all...tonight at dinner we were translating a sentence in Chinese --
Could you give me the bottle of juice that i gave you this afternoon to put in the refrigerator? turned out to be very different....can't remember now....

I am learning the order of the strokes and remember that thenumber of strokes in a character is used to categorize that character so it is important to know the # of strokes as well as the order in which the strokes aremade.

I have been practicing writing the radicals that are used as base stems in many characters but find it puzzling why these particular words are radicals? Why are these words the basefor so many words?

I also discovered today that some of these syllables with the same tones represent different meanings -- many homophones, it appears -- that explains why sometimes my Chinese studentswill write out the character on the palms of their hands when they are trying to figure out what someone has said in Chinese.

We went to a resort/hotel just outside the town today after class to see if the swimming pool is open and we found what is a cement pool area all locked up with very dirty water...there is also a lake with 3 paddle boats...also not very clean and certainly not for swimming but possibly ok for paddling....we talked with the manager and they will perhaps try to clean it up for us. The hotel has apparetnly been rented out to the government as a place for railroad workers to stay while they are constructing the railroad which is being built on the hill in back of the hotel. During this time that they are staying there, the pool has fallen into disrepair.... it's not clear whether we'll be able to swim or not...I am not sure about the safety of swimming in the water even if they clean it. It seems that we use a lot of chlorine in pools int he States, don't we?

Tomorrow we are going to try to show a movie. Judy has March of the Penguins and we are going to try to do something to prep the students before they view the video...it's still in the planning stages.

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