Love my neighbor...

...cause he's saving my life.

My neighbor, Benjamin "Benja" Clark is an expert on foreign language teaching and he's here on a fellowship through the U.S. State Department. He's had years of experience teaching as a college adjunct in America and he's read a lot of research in this profession as well as done his own research across the whole spectrum of learning abilities (from college-level to special needs youths).

He doesn't speak Chinese, (he taught French) but the methodology and goal setting that he's been helping me with has been invaluable.


To give you some perspective on just how valuable this is let me describe the help I've received in class preparation thus far:

Since I got here I've asked professors and students alike what the average freshman already knows of English and what might be the best way to teach them in terms of useful topics and in effective second-language teaching methodologies. Just about everyone (and I mean "just about everyone") gave me one or two examples of topics discussed and said "don't worry about it". Twice now I've been handed standard textbooks after asking for general explanations of what I should teach (I now have two copies each of the student and teacher versions of the text for my class, and both the student & teacher versions of the next level beyond mine).

In all of this time no one has ever sat down and said anything like:
- "your students already know _________, so start by reviewing _______",
- "in my experience, new students need to learn _________, be sure you include that at some point",
or even just
- "students love when a teacher _______".

So to have someone with experience in methodology and second-language teaching technique come along and say:
- "these are some goals we should shoot for",
- "this is how we'll do it",
- "here are just a couple ideas about what we could do in the classroom, we'll collaborate on some more later",

...it's really nothing short of a god-send.


Oh, and a few days ago my colleague who was my Chinese teacher in America, Julie Luo, gave me a jar of homemade raspberry jam that she got from her host family. This morning I tried it on some breakfast rolls that are the Chinese equivalent of plain biscuits -
They... Were... AWESOME!