Walking & Thinking in the UK II

Lou has two cute daughters. They both go to private school and they will pay about 7 thousand pounds per year for school. At their school,there are  only 10 students in a class. I think this is expensive ,but she said in some elite schools, parents will pay about thirty or forty pounds for the tuition. In all the public schools,there are thirty students in a class. I think in all the countries,educational balance has a very long way to go.

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Every time when I talked with the people who live in Brighton. They always said,we are lucky because we live in Brighton. I agree with them cause the environment here is so comfortable. Everywhere is surrounded by old and big trees and all the ground is green grass-covered.

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The first class is in the reading room. The teacher introduced the different areas of the room to us by completing a discovery quiz card,not just only talking. I can remember this way that is the same when I participated in TIP in Beijing 2013. She told us how to encourage students to read by some activities. I think the methods are useful.

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The second lesson is about teaching methodology. The teacher is a knowledgeable gentleman who called Gary. He taught us  Swedish in Swedish. We are not allowed to speak English or Chinese. He told us as a teacher. We must know the lesson includes items that are central to the lesson,and some items that are peripheral. He doesn’t like any performance in his class because he thought that is not real communication.And also the students will feel nervous when they stand on the platform. On the other hand, the other students will do nothing during the performance time. They are just bystanders. He prefer learning by doing and speak ,discuss with partners. I can also remember two Swedish sentences from his class.First one is ‘Kan du stavar det for may?’which means ‘Can you spell it for me,please?’. The second one is ‘hva heter du?’ which means ‘What’s your name?’.

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In the afternoon,we had a reading class with Nancy, a beautiful woman with great memory. She remembered twenty names of us in five minutes by doing activities. That is unbelievable.

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From the lessons this day, I knew that ,as a foreign language teacher, the most important thing we must do that is building your students’ self-confidence,and make them feel safe and comfortable in your class,then learning.