Session 6 Nebula

Storytelling--- volunteer as an English teacher for 3 months

I had been a volunteer as an English teacher in a school for children of migrant workers for 3 months and was responsible for teaching English class for grade 5 and 6. I found that the children in this school were all very poor at English; in fact some children even could not recognize alphabet A, B, C… though they had started learning English from grade 3. With high enthusiasm but lacking of professional English teacher and learning resources limits their chance to enhance English. So I decided to take some English books every time, which collected from my friends and my relatives, and gave these children as a prize to who participated class most actively.

I was so deeply touched by their learning attitude towards English because they were so curious about the this new language that I could always find some question slips nipped in their homework. Unfortunately, no computers, no iphones or ipads promoted their learning, but the knowledge was only from their English books and some extracurricular books brought by me. When I came back to my university, I felt so shamed about the absent rate in my English class. My classmates had the most advanced language learning facilities and experienced teachers, but some of them were sick of learning so much or even absent to attend the class.

I think school organization should more focus on the significance of learning itself but not only on the academic performance. The children in most big cities do not acknowledge that their opportunities are so precious due to Chinese biggest population among the world. I also hope more university students will be encouraged to join in the voluntary association as a teacher to bring more learning resources and new ideas to the children in rural areas.

Session 6 Junyan

Like many organizations, Guangdong museum provides a series of training in order to improve the working ability of new staffs. I still remember the first lesson, how to work in the museum, gave by a famous professor, Dr. Liu.

Session 6 ELEVEN

I remember when I had my internship in Channel Zhejiang, many staff would talk about one thing:

One day, every one came to work as usual. When they step into the office building, they see a white banner hung on the central over their heads, and it says:  RIP Mr.xxx. Mr.xxx is a hard-working journalist who treats every piece of news seriously, but finally died for overwork. Every day he visit at least 4 pieces of news and after work, he always took the overtime. His office is always light on in the midnight. You know, the capable are usually the busy one, the leaders believe in his working ability and his sense of responsibility. But unfortunately, it caused his death.

In recent years, media becomes a high healthy-risk industry as the staff suffer more physical & psychological pressure than those in other general working units. We can lalways see many news tell that a media staff die for same reason. And more and more people realized that TV station should release staff’s stress and ease their  workload. But most leaders would think that, only the heavy stress can push staff work hard, better and efficient. Thus, it comes to an issue that should the staff take too much workloads. When cannot settle down the argument, staff would tell that true story in order to struggle for their rights, also they think they should work for live instead of live for work. They do not hope the tragedy happen again.

Session 6 Neo (Hao Qiang)

Storytelling-Power of analogy

I work in a language training school for three years, and the school hires new teachers every year. Sometimes there is need for new teachers to explain sth highly abstract to their students, and no matter how carefully they prepare their instruction; they will find that students are either bored or confused by the instruction. In such situation, I think an analogy is usually helpful illustrating their ideas and keeping students interested. The following story is what I communicate with them before:

Most language teachers know that reciting passages in foreign language is painful, but highly worthwhile exercise, and students should go through such an experience anyway if they want to improve from the entry level to an intermediate level, but how to make students understand the necessity of reciting? That’s an abstract topic confronted by most language teachers.