Love——the key to motivate our students
Good afternoon ladies and gentleman,
It is a great honor to be chosen to speak here. I value this chance of sharing teaching experience with distinguished teachers very much. To be honest I felt rather nostalgic when somebody told me I would make a speech before all of you fine people. I can still remember when I made my first speech in college. My heart would have jumped out of my chest if I hadn’t tried my best to control my breath. The reason lies in the fact that I really didn’t know what to say at that time!
Well today, being a teacher of English for some years in Shenzhen, I have a strong sense of responsibility, which always fills me with strength and confidence.
I am from Xinzhou Middle School located in the west part of Shenzhen. There are two extremes in my school. About 38% are from local resident families, whose parents are rich and some even rich enough to own several buildings. But some of the children in such families turned out to be slow in their lessons. They seem to have everything but the motivation of learning. However, About 60% of the students are from working class families in the villages near by, whose parents hold temporary residence identities. Sometimes when we visit these students at home we noticed that a large proportion of their living standards are very critical. Some don’t even have desks good enough to finish their homework on. No wonder they appear quite reluctant to pay enough attention to the teachers in classes, and always find excuses not to finish their homework. And according to assessment criteria there are 40% students struggling to get a pass in the English learning. Some even can not make a proper sentence before they are going to take the matriculation examinations.
I still remember once I saw my student coming to school with one arm hanging on her neck. When asked she just said she was careless when she run across a pond, fell down and broke her arm. But later I got to know that she fell from the place she sleeps on the temporary second floor at home, where half of it is a small shop in the village, while she was climbing down the ladder. At that time she was in a hurry to go to school. Not until then did I realized how hard it is for some of our students to manage to survive in Shenzhen, let along concentrate in learning their lessons at school. I believe if children live in poverty, they learn to fight for their future, if children live in comfort they learn to enjoy themselves.
Then come the question, “How could I help them?” “What do they need most?” After some years of practicing I got to know three golden rules in English teaching in such kind of schools.
Rule No.1 Getting to know what exactly problems in our students’ learning English have and trying best to give them individual instructions;
Rule No.2 Try best to build up their confidence, let them have a taste of success. Make them believe that English is not that difficult as they thought to be;
Rule No.3 Never trying to teach them the knowledge of English until they really mastered their own way of studying. For the most valuable knowledge is not the knowledge itself; it is the learning strategy.
Rule No. 4 The most important aspect in teaching here is love we cherish during teaching. If we don’t love our students whole-heartedly we will never succeed in secondary education in Shenzhen.
So from what my experience, “love” is the key to motivate our students!
Thank you!