I’m looking for some advice regarding my first teaching job at a newly established cram school. I started in September, and I was surprised to find that the only materials provided are low-quality textbooks—one for each class. I’ve been informed that these textbooks are my sole teaching resources and need to last the entire academic year.
I teach three two-hour lessons a week for the grade three class and four two-hour lessons a week for the grade one class. I’m struggling to fill the time since I can only cover a few pages of the textbooks weekly, and I don’t have any additional resources. I find myself spending a lot of time outside of class planning lessons without compensation, which is not what I expected from a part-time job.
Could anyone offer advice on how to manage this situation? Are there any good resources or ideas to help fill the lesson time? Also, is this situation typical? I was surprised by the lack of resources and guidance from management, but I think I’ve probably been naive in my expectations.
I have spoken to my boss about the issue, but she has no advice and is unwilling to provide more materials.
Thanks in advance for any advice or reassurance you can offer!
I used to spend a considerable amount of time teaching and getting them to speak. One way was to do role call. With each student I’d ask them some basic question(s) such as “do you like chocolate cake? Can you ride a bike? Are you a student?”. They then had to answer these questions using complete sentences (Yes, I do/No, I don’t. Yes, I can/No, I can’t. Yes, I am/No, I’m not) and most of the kids really got into it. Eventually I’d come up with really silly questions such as “can you fly? Do you have ice cream in your ears? etc etc. This really opened up a whole can of funny worms and eventually I got them to become the teacher and do the roll call. I’d take a seat behind a desk and let one or two of them go at it and it was great. I had 1st and 2nd graders asking and answering questions. Lots of fun and it took up a lot of time. Also, the owner who watched and recorded everything seemed to like it.
Another thing I’d do after reviewing the vocabulary for that week’s chapter was to ask the students what they saw on the page. Again, they’d have to answer in complete sentences. I’d also ask them, “How many cars do you see in this picture?” And then they all be racing to count how many. There was so much on each page and that took up a lot of time.
Towards the end I’d ask them to make up simple sentences using that chapter’s vocabulary and then write them down in their notebooks.
I did some basic grammar and that was explaining (in my own words) how English and Chinese are not the same and that we have to sometimes change the way we think. Then I’d teach them a whole bunch of “question words” and then get them to come up with simple sentences using them. I also taught them how to conjugate some basic and very important verbs. For some reason this is not really taught here but I just drilled it into their little brains over and over again.
At the end of the day you have to use your imagination with them and figure out what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps if you can find out what their Taiwanese teachers are teaching them, you can use some of that material to give them a head start. This can make a huge difference for some of them. I was very bad a playing games. The only one I’d do was hangman. I guess you could say that I played a lot of “speaking games” because they laughed a lot and thought they were fun.
Another thing to work on is reading. Help them to sound out the words rather than memorize them. Many kids do that because that’s how they learn how to read Chinese.
I was teaching 4 classes, 4 hours a day, 4 days a week. Once I had my spiel down, I was in and out in no time. Very little prep and no real bullshit.
Grade ones I would just pick a few songs from Super Simple Songs and have them listen 2-3 times (no requirement to sing along) and then teach all the language in the songs, then have them listen again and this time sing along. Pause on the words they don’t know and go over them. Make sure they know the meaning of every word in Chinese too.
Grade 3 I strongly recommend looking into Comprehensible Input/TPRS (and doing it correctly. Anyone who says “it doesn’t work” is doing it wrong.) You can easily spend 2 hours on the sentence “there is a cat” if you circle it correctly (“is there a cat? Yes” “am I a cat? No, of course not! I am an elephant!” “Are you a cat? No, you’re a dog!”)