Saturday, 16 May 2009
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Every lesson is a new lesson
Mr Patrick Chan is an expert English teacher who has served Hong Kong's primary education tirelessly for over thirty years. He is about to retire soon. A week ago, I visited him to invite him to talk about a memorable event for my podcast. As a veteran teacher who teaches from the heart, Mr Chan has plenty of such stories to tell. On this occasion, he told the one below:
Last year, my school wished to take part in an exemplary teaching award competition organized by a teachers’ association. Each participating school would nominate one candidate for the award. In my school, my colleagues in the English department decided to put it to the vote, and as I got the highest number of votes, I became the school’s candidate for the competition. Having taught for over thirty years, I was not particularly keen about this kind of competition, but since it was the result of the vote, I accepted the nomination and went ahead with the preparation.
To take part in the competition, a candidate had to send to the organization committee a video of a lesson he had taught, the lesson plan, and the accompanying teaching materials. Although previously I was not particularly excited about the competition, once I had started the preparation, I became a bit nervous, as I didn’t want to let my colleagues down. And although at the time I was actually quite busy with preparing students for the TSA, I put in a lot of time preparing for the video lesson. The topic for the video lesson was question words. To make the lesson more special, I incorporated some additional elements, like catering for individual differences. I prepared two sets of activity materials, one set for the more able students, and another set for the less able ones. For the running dictation, I designed two sets of worksheets. I was becoming hopeful that I would be able to teach a good lesson. But in the actual lesson, maybe because I had over-estimated the students’ ability, the students did not respond as actively as I had expected. And I managed to cover only two-thirds of what I had planned. As you can imagine, the lesson did not turn out to be as good as I had hoped.
I didn’t give up at that point, and tried the same lesson with another class. But this second attempt did not turn out to be any better than the first one. So I decided to send the first lesson video to the organizing committee. Although this video did not capture my best teaching performance, there was no time left to start all over again.
Later, as I had expected, I didn’t get the award. I was a bit unhappy, not because I didn’t get the award, but because I had not been able to produce a lesson video which would capture my teaching competence at its best. I tried to comfort myself by saying that I had prepared well, that I had tried my best under the circumstances, and that I shouldn’t really mind whether I could get the award or not. Anyway, my busy daily schedule didn’t give me much time to brood over the experience, and I soon returned to my usual enthusiasm in teaching.
Looking back, I realize that having a lot of experience does not guarantee that every lesson you teach will be a great lesson. Every lesson is a new lesson, and a different lesson. So learning to become a master teacher is a lifelong journey. Sometimes, even with the best preparation, a lesson may still go wrong. The important thing is to keep up your spirits, as well as keep improving.
To listen to the story told by Mr Patrick Chan in his own voice, go to:
http://paulsze.podomatic.com/entry/2009-05-13T21_49_40-07_00
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