1 September 2014
At the beginning of a school year, I would like to wish all of you, students and teachers alike, a fruitful year. Learning experience is a magical thing, no matter how many times teachers teach an item, the experience is different. Although the subject matter may be the same, the students’ responses are not, and from that point, new knowledge and discussions spark to take the subject matter to a new height.
Even when we had had a perfect learning experience last school year, we can prepare to receive new challenges this year. I just had a staff meeting with teachers; I reminded teachers to set measures to specific tasks in order to reach the goal. Let me explain it in a student version: if a student wants to improve English reading skills (this is the task he wants to do), he should NOT just say: read more. He should say I want to improve my reading skills, so that by the end of this year I can read faster, understand passages quicker, use more newly-learned phrases, and respond more succinctly than in the last year. He should set out clear measures, for example,
- to read English newspapers for at least 30 minutes every day;
- to read aloud for 15 minutes every day using text in English, preferably from school books of other subjects to strengthen his everyday language use;
- to summarize a 1000-word article into a shorter piece every week to see if he can capture the essence of the original article, and the like.
Then he evaluates his progress every two months. Think of the specific exercise and diet-menu particulars when a person wants to lose weight, use the same mentality to set measures to specific tasks in order to reach your goal in this year. Of course the process will be difficult, but the fruit will always be sweet.
I wish you all a very good school year.
Anson Yang |
