My stories 50 teaching in general 一般教課
Running across a Facebook post about the additional busy life of being lockdown and teach from home, I was reminded of my days of teaching and how I survived two concurrent fulltime jobs as a first-time college instructor and a full-time founder of the placement office of that new college.
In 1995 I quit the job at the aircraft manufacturing company and went back to Taiwan reporting to the college on August 31 to meet the requirement of starting employment office for the new school year.
I was led to the vacant classroom that was designated to be converted to be the office of alumni placement services. I was also assigned to teach three sessions of the required course of "introduction to computer" as part of the general education. I have to start two new careers right away covering the designs and implementation plans in two fields.
Before that, I heard of the talking about how difficult it was to prepare for every gathering in classrooms and for the examinations, without giving any thoughts.
I was given some textbooks from the publishers to select for the courses. Having published textbooks for my choice making the course preparation easier than planning from scratch. The challenges include the unequal numbers of classroom hours but the same week for the mid-term and the final examinations. I quickly realized that classroom instructions should not be the key and the most important elements of my teaching because I could not guarantee that I gave exactly same instruction to the three different sessions with different numbers of classroom hours, especially when I encourage questions and answer in the classroom.
Teaching has been one of my lifetime dreams since the first day I entered the school system as a first-grade pupil. Other than teaching Sunday School classes and the Vacation Bible Classes, this was my first chance to teach formally.
I set up my first principle as "teaching the freshmen students how to read the textbook rather than how to learn from lectures". They should have learned how to listen and learn from lecture in the high schools. How would I teach if I were teaching in a high school classroom?
One of the phenomena I learned while I studied sociology in college was about how the new knowledge move down the ranks of learning from the frontier inventors and researchers to the graduate school down to the kindergarten. The first example I learned was the fact about the Sun circling the glove rather than rising from the sea over the plain of earth. It started as a life-endangering knowledge with nobody to respond positively.
I didn't have the chance to learn to do research until my Sophmore year in college. I found that my live-in niece was exposed to research in her high school days. This means that there is no rule to keep high school students from learning the arts of researching. This realization help me relax and feel comfortable to inspire rather than instruct in the classroom.
As I recall my college days I conclude that a textbook was for learning the structure of the knowledge and the students learn to read the textbook by themselves after the mid-term examination. This means I could simply demonstrate how I study the textbook before the mid-term and encourage the student to learn by studying the textbook themselves.
I tried several ways of classroom activities and examinations in my three semesters of college-teaching. I also found my missions also include some methods of testing to measure the students' achievement fairly and effectively. 2020/4/3 14:13
In 1995 I quit the job at the aircraft manufacturing company and went back to Taiwan reporting to the college on August 31 to meet the requirement of starting employment office for the new school year.
I was led to the vacant classroom that was designated to be converted to be the office of alumni placement services. I was also assigned to teach three sessions of the required course of "introduction to computer" as part of the general education. I have to start two new careers right away covering the designs and implementation plans in two fields.
Before that, I heard of the talking about how difficult it was to prepare for every gathering in classrooms and for the examinations, without giving any thoughts.
I was given some textbooks from the publishers to select for the courses. Having published textbooks for my choice making the course preparation easier than planning from scratch. The challenges include the unequal numbers of classroom hours but the same week for the mid-term and the final examinations. I quickly realized that classroom instructions should not be the key and the most important elements of my teaching because I could not guarantee that I gave exactly same instruction to the three different sessions with different numbers of classroom hours, especially when I encourage questions and answer in the classroom.
Teaching has been one of my lifetime dreams since the first day I entered the school system as a first-grade pupil. Other than teaching Sunday School classes and the Vacation Bible Classes, this was my first chance to teach formally.
I set up my first principle as "teaching the freshmen students how to read the textbook rather than how to learn from lectures". They should have learned how to listen and learn from lecture in the high schools. How would I teach if I were teaching in a high school classroom?
One of the phenomena I learned while I studied sociology in college was about how the new knowledge move down the ranks of learning from the frontier inventors and researchers to the graduate school down to the kindergarten. The first example I learned was the fact about the Sun circling the glove rather than rising from the sea over the plain of earth. It started as a life-endangering knowledge with nobody to respond positively.
I didn't have the chance to learn to do research until my Sophmore year in college. I found that my live-in niece was exposed to research in her high school days. This means that there is no rule to keep high school students from learning the arts of researching. This realization help me relax and feel comfortable to inspire rather than instruct in the classroom.
As I recall my college days I conclude that a textbook was for learning the structure of the knowledge and the students learn to read the textbook by themselves after the mid-term examination. This means I could simply demonstrate how I study the textbook before the mid-term and encourage the student to learn by studying the textbook themselves.
I tried several ways of classroom activities and examinations in my three semesters of college-teaching. I also found my missions also include some methods of testing to measure the students' achievement fairly and effectively. 2020/4/3 14:13
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