美国课堂之自由发言

美国中小学课堂的整体氛围可能要比中国课堂活跃的多，促成这一特点的原因很多，比如以学生为中心教学法在课堂中的运用— 老师会设计及应用尽量多的活动让学生作为主角参与讨论；再有就是美国私立中学的师生比一般在1:8 - 1:12之间，这使每个学生在课堂中都有存在感，也就有更多的机会发表自己的观点，从而使课堂变得较为活跃；最后就是自由发言的问题。

对于自由发言的定义，很多人可能觉得美国学生在课堂上想说什么就说什么，可以口无遮拦，无限自由地发表自己的观点。这样的理解其实不完全正确。美国学生的确在课堂上发言的自由度很 高，自己对探讨的话题有什么看法，或是心里有什么疑问，都会毫不犹豫的说出来。很大程度上这样的自由促成了美国人最为重视的批判性思维，也是很多创新理念的摇篮。然而，其实在现实中，学生自由发言还是有限制的。没有规矩，不成方圆，没有一些规则，美国人真的就要为所欲为了。这些规则是老师来定的，如果一个老师不在乎自己的学生说什么，怎么说，那么学生完全可以享有无限的话语自由。但事情并非这么简单，可想而知你一言我一语，不受控制的课堂一定是失败的课堂，所以美国大部分的老师都会在第一堂课就为自己的课堂制定好规矩。这些规矩可能包括“同一时间，只有一个人可以说话”，避免了学生抢话的现象；“要耐心听完别人的发言，才能表达自己的观点”，从而培养学生尊重他人的态度等等。

美国学生上课发言最“放肆”的阶段可能是在7-9年级（13-15岁）。这个时候，即将步入青春期，或者已经处于青春期的孩子们初次从课堂上了解到了言论自由的甜头，并且想极力展示自我。再加上这个年纪的孩子（一般是男孩子）不知道哪来的自信，都觉得自己是最搞笑的，而且越搞笑就越可以博得女同学的眼球，所以有时候课上很小的一件事引发的话题，都会被学生们聊成一个故事，最后不受了控制，整个课堂就炸开了锅。所以作为老师，最重要的工作就是在开锅之前，把火熄灭。

其实从幼儿园开始，学校就会培养小朋友举手发言的习惯。对于年纪比较小的学生，有些控制学生发言的小技巧，可以很好的运用到老师们的课堂当中。首先，要让学生明白发言是对于他们遵守纪律，好好学习的一种奖励，是一种荣誉。再有，就是如何保障课堂发言的公平性。有些时候，一个班级里总有个别的同学特别活跃，而其他的一些学生却总是抢不到发言的机会。两个小窍门可以帮助改变这种状况：一是老师可以制作一个抽签筒，用冰棍儿棒写上学生的名字做成签，需要学生发言但又不想陷入混乱就可以用抽签的方法（如左图）；二是每节课之前老师可以发给每个学生五个小贴画（或类似物品），学生每发言一次就要上交一张贴画，一节课一共有五次发言的机会，用完了就没有了，这样可以确保学生公平发言的机会，也可以培养学生先思考再说话的习惯。而对于大一点儿的孩子，比如说初中生，用美国人的一句话就是“don’t smile until Christmas”，尤其是对于新老师，或者刚接手一个新班的老师，一切关键就是在圣诞节以前不要展现出自己善良的一面......

如果在美国课堂上作弊，你会有什么下场

美国私立高中，甚至从初中八年级开始，就会设有Honor Council（诚信委员会），旨在监督以及教育学生不诚信的行为，比如抄作业或者考试作弊等等。整个委员会是由9-12年级每个年级各两名学生代表，以及教师队伍中的两名代表组成。其履行责任的形式则是像法庭一样，比如若有学生违反了Honor Code（诚信准则），委员会成员就会为这个学生举行一次听证会，通过讨论决定如何对这个学生做出惩罚。

当然，既然是一个小法庭， 学生就有为自己辩解的权力，甚至学生可以找老师来做自己的辩护人。但是犯错就是犯错，无论轻重，都会得到相应的惩罚。至于惩罚措施，学校会根据学生的认错态度，前科，年龄等等不同因素来决定，轻到警告，取消考试成绩，重到停课甚至被开除都有可能。

通过我在美国中学教书的这两年经验来看，高年级学生作弊的现象的确比较少见，即使是在无人监督的课堂小测验上，学生也可以严格要求自己，做到诚信。因为作弊的后果直接影响到他们是不是有学上或者大学申请是否成功，这种代价并不是普通学生能够承受得起的。

以下是一个学生接受诚信委员会调查的例子，例子里的学生因为考试作弊需要受到惩罚：

Student A, this email is to summarize our discussion today:

• You have been accused of cheating. (你已经被指控作弊)
• You will sit before the Honor Council Wednesday 4/13 at 3:45pm to discuss the event. (你将会在4月13号星期三下午3:45和诚信委员会讨论这一问题)
• I encourage you to discuss this with your advisor immediately. (我建议你尽快去和你的导师讨论一下这个问题)
• On Wednesday, wait with your advisor until I call him to let them know the council is ready to see you. (星期三，请和你的导师一起等待，待诚信委员会准备好后，我会告知你的导师)
• Please submit to me your written version of events by tomorrow morning. (请在明天早上以前提交一份书面文稿阐述事情的经过)
• If you choose to have an advocate in addition to your advisor, please confirm who will act as your advocate in your written version of events. (除了你的导师以外，如果你还想选择另一个人作为你的辩护人，你可以在书面文稿里作出说明)
• Mr. B or Mrs. C will notify your parents of the hearing within 24 hours. I strongly encourage you to discuss the incident with them before then. (B老师和C老师会在24小时以内通知你的家长关于听证会的事情。我强烈建议你在此之前将此次事件告诉你的父母)

以下是诚信委员会在探讨过后决定对此学生进行的惩罚措施：

Student A, this email is to summarize your discussion with Mr.B today. For cheating on your math exam you will serve the following consequence:

• 2 days of work (参与两天校园工作，例如除草，清洁等等)
• a discussion with Mrs.D about the potential ramifications of cheating on college and beyond. Please contact Mrs. D to arrange a time to talk. (与D老师谈话，讨论在大学里作弊的严重性)
• A letter of apology to Mrs. E (给E老师写一封道歉信)

例子中学生受到的惩罚虽然不是最重的，但是足以让这个学生认识到作弊后果的严重性。同时，如此繁琐严谨的审判程序，也让学生从小就可以了解到，诚信这件事情是非常严肃的。

Fun Dictation

Memorizing new words could be a dull task. How to make it more interesting? There might be a lot of different ways, but here is the one that I did with my students.

There was a traditional way in Chinese schools “dictation”, that helps to check students work on memorizing the new words. Literally, the teacher will call out the words one at a time, and students just put the words that they hear down on paper. It was a good way to test if the students memorize the words, however, it wasn’t fun.

I ask my students to dictate on sticky notes. If they have the right words, they can put the notes on the side; if they get it wrong, they should stick the notes on their faces. In the end, the student who has the least sticky notes on their face wins. For the winner, I usually give them an extra point on their next quiz. We did the fun dictation for several times, and I can tell that it helps the students to memorize the new words and makes everything more interesting.

Teaching Tips 教学小贴士：

It might be helpful to go over the words with students beforehand by using Quizlet or similar tools.

Rubber Band Characters

I got this idea from Pinterest and traced the idea back to a website called CreativeRoots for creative art and design. After some modification, I made my lesson plan on learning the housing revolution in Hong Kong based on the topic of “family” and designed this project for students to do as their end of first trimester project, which I think was a success.

The original idea for the artwork Chinese Rubberband was from a Hong Kong designer Che Manching. In his work, he wants to tell everybody that although Hong Kong experienced ups and downs through years, it is still a prosperous place that most of the Hong Kong people love to stay. Also, the rubber bands represent that “Hong Kong people can bend and stretch” under such big changes. This idea perfectly matches a book, named Hong Kong Pop Up, that I want to introduce and read to my students. This book talks about the housing revolution of a typical Chinese family which migrated from mainland China to Hong Kong around 1940’s, and the book also has very cute pop up design, which students can explore and learn. The whole idea is to help my students understand what does “family” mean to Chinese people, and what the spirit that Chinese people hold when they are seen as parts of their families. In the book, the author tells us that no matter how hard his grandparents’ life was, they were still trying their best to build up and protect their family. In the end, he also mentions that when Chinese people are getting old, all they want is a peaceful land that belongs to themselves and their families, so that they can feel secure and happy for the rest of their lives. I also use this chance to teach my students a Chinese idiom “能屈能伸”， which describes people who are flexible under different types of pressure and life situations.

After we finished the book and I introduced the project, I asked my students to come up with ideas for the characters or phrases that they want to make with the rubber bands. The standard for them to choose the characters was that the characters should represent their spirit to some degree. They finally agreed with the phrase “幸福之家”, which means “a family full of happiness”.

Materials needed for the project:

1. Cork boards
2. Pins
3. Colorful rubber bands

Teaching Tips 教学小贴士：

1. If you want to use the students’ work as decoration, choose the cork boards with good qualities
2. Tell the students do not use too many rubber bands on one certain areas of the characters, otherwise, the cork board will be bending
3. Make sure your students understand the meaning of every character that they are making
4. Link for the CreativeRoots website http://creativeroots.org/2011/11/chinese-rubberband-typo/

Poem Study (3): Be a Poet!

It doesn’t matter when do you want to do this, but finally, you would love your students to write their own poems in Chinese. It may sounds a little bit crazy at this point, since your students probably can not even make complete sentences in Chinese. Don’t worry, my students do not really know how to make complete sentences at this time either, however, you may be impressed by some of their poems! Remember, the most important thing for them is not to speak perfect Chinese, but to experience, and enjoy learning Chinese. Here I’ll let you know how I did it.

I really appreciate the teacher’s guide for A Thousand Peaks: Poems from China, a picture book introduces and collects Chinese poems and includes their translations, written by Siyu Liu and Orel Protopopescu. I don’t have the book, but I got the teacher’s guide online and I feel it is really helpful. From a teacher’s point of view, it gives the idea on how to teach poem as well as teach the language. The guide starts with an introduction on Chinese poem’s history, structure and wording etc., and followed by a series of instructions on how to guide students writing their own poems. As suggested in the guide, the way to scaffold students is providing the pattern of a poem as shown in the following chart:

Adjective Noun Verb Connecting Word Noun
Adjective Noun Verb Connecting Word Noun
Verb Noun Connecting Word Adjective Noun
Verb Noun Connecting Word Adjective Noun

One type of Chinese poem is composed of four sentences, and five characters in each line. In order to make it easier, the pattern has fixed properties for each character. On the next page of the guide, the authors provide four lists of English words that fall into each of the categories. I didn’t really read through the instruction on how to do this activity from the guide, while just by looking at these two charts, I fostered the idea in my head to let my students pick up words from the lists and compose their own poems. While just finishing the poem in English with a Chinese pattern is obviously not enough. Since we just introduced the origin of Chinese characters from our previous lessons, I wish the students could design their own characters according to their imaginations. So in the end, what I expected from the students were “looking like but not really” Chinese poems.

I talked about this idea with one of my colleagues, or my mentor, and I indicated that my concern was if this activity was too difficult for my students, and what if they told me that they had no idea how to design their own characters. I know my students well, that no matter how interesting I think one activity is, there must be some of them think it is boring and too hard for them to finish. The suggestion from my mentor really inspired me a lot and made me feel confident that this activity would work well. He told me that I could bring my students outside and let them feel the nature while they were writing the poems. I think it was a great idea since students could look around and get inspiration from the nature about how they want to design their characters, since anyway, it was how the ancient people created the characters in a real case from thousands of years ago.

Here are the steps that you can follow to adopt this activity:

1. Bring your students to the outside, and ask them to look around and relax;
2. Follow the pattern, ask your students to pick up words from the lists to finish their poems
3. Ask students to design characters for each word, and put them onto the “rice” paper (image 1) as their final work (they need to write from right to left, and top to bottom, like ancient people!)
4. Share their poems in the class

image 1

image 2

By providing the lists of words, I put Chinese translations (Pinyin) on the side (image 2). However, for some of the words I left them blank since there are more than one translation in Chinese for that specific words, and it depends on the context of the whole poem to select the best one. For example the word “dying” from the category of “Verbs” could be translated into “逝 (shi)” or “灭 (mie)” in Chinese depending on different situations. Therefore, I asked my students to come to me whenever they chose words like those. Also, I asked my students to put their final works in an ancient way (writing vertically). I always remind me that the most important thing for students who are learning a foreign language in this age are more like experiencing new things and having fun than studying something seriously! So this is one part of it! And if you also like it, try it!

Student Work

Teaching Tips 教学小贴士：

1. Some of the word might be too abstract for students to design a character for, so you may want to show them how we write it nowadays to give them a hint.
2. Some of my students said they didn’t want to design their own characters and just want to copy the real Chinese characters instead. You may talk about this in advance, to set your expectation and how do you want to deal the case like this.

Poem Study (2): Task Challenges for Groups and Having Fun

image from internet

When I am thinking about classroom activities, I am always thinking about having fun. I think that would be even boring for the teacher to teach if the activities are not fun at all. However, it is always difficult to think about an activity which is both interesting and educational. Plus, the students are hard to be satisfied as well. For me, I feel it is both exciting and risky to launch a brand new activity in class. But anyway, I enjoy the exciting part, and I hope you do too.

Group working works really well for my class. You may find this activity fit you or your class the best if you are also a type of teacher who doesn’t really have loud voice, and needs to clear your throat from time to time. I am a quiet person, and I am tired of yelling at students, so I took some time to figure out a best way for both my students and I. It turned out that group working the best way until now, since it not only provides a chance for students to talk and participate more, but also a chance for me to spend time working with each students and making sure that they understand what is going on during classes.

As I introduced in my last blog, the textbook that we use includes several poems along with the learning of characters. The second poem we worked on was In the Quiet Night (静夜思) by Bai Li (李白). I remember when I taught the first poem, one of my students asked me why they needed to learn the poems. She was even a little bit resistant that time and refused to learn. It was actually a great question that I had never thought about. I learned poems from very little when I was educated to be literate and I never doubted how the poems could help with my Chinese learning. I guess the easier part for me to learn and memorize those poems than the American students was that I had already known how to speak in Chinese during that time, and the only challenge for me was a limited number of new words that I had never heard about. But still, I learn new words and characters through the rhythm of poems. I told the students that learning poem was a way to help you build up your Chinese vocabulary, however I know it is hard for them to understand since they don’t really have the environment to practice. Just like how Chinese people learn English in China. Although we know the words and grammars, we are not really motivated since we don’t really have chances to use it.

This time, I still put my students into three groups. While different from last time, the tasks for each group are different. I let each group to keep their tasks as secret, so they will not know what other groups are doing until the presentation afterwards. The first group took the task to interview the Chinese students (I took the advantage of our school has international students from China, and I think it is a good opportunity to encourage the American students to use resources), and finish the tasks as follow:

1. Ask the Chinese students if they could memorize and recite the poem. Take down how many people you have interviewed, and how many of them still remember the poem. (Ask them to recite it)
2. Ask the Chinese students about the meaning of the poem (meaning for each line).
3. Ask the Chinese students if they still remember the information about the author, and encourage them to tell you as much as they could. (Make sure that they are not looking it up from the internet)

By communicating with the Chinese students, I hope my students can understand why they are learning Chinese poems to some degree, and I can tell that the little girl who was resistant at first changed her mind a lot after she interviewed the Chinese students.

The task for the second group is focusing on the translation of the poem. However, this time, they were asked to translate from English to Chinese. On their task sheet (Table 1), they will read a version of English translation for the poem first. Under the translation, I provide the Chinese characters, Pinyin and translation for each line of the poem, but in a wrong order. The students are supposed to translate the poem back into Chinese by rearranging the characters according to their understandings of the English translation.

In the Quiet Night

In front of my bed the moonlight is very bright,

I wonder if that can be frost on the floor.

I lift up my head and look at the dazzling moon,

I drop my head, drowned in nostalgia.

---- Translated by Amy Lowell

Altered by the author

night夜yè		quiet静jìng			miss思sī
front 前qián	moon月yuè		bright明míng	Bed床chuáng		light光guāng
up上shàng	doubt疑yí		frost霜shuāng	is是shì		ground地dì
head头tóu	bright明míng		lift举jǔ	moon月yuè		look far望wàng
Ancient 故gù	miss思sī		Head头tóu	drop低dī		village乡xiāng

Table 1

Although some of my students kept saying this made no sense, they actually did a great job in translating the poem back into Chinese. I asked them to compare their translations with the original work by the author afterwards. Even though they all had different versions of translations, it didn’t hurt as long as they understood that exploration and fun were the most important parts of this task.

The last group took the task of searching the information about the author, and finding out what the author wants to tell us through this poem. Sometimes, learning the author is even more important than learning some specific poems. Especially in this case when the author was really famous and had a dramatic life. Most importantly, the author wrote many pieces of amazing poems during his era. After all of the three groups finished their tasks, I asked each group to do a 5 minute presentation to show their work.

Teaching Tips 教学小贴士：

1. During the presentation, you may ask the group who does the translation to present front of the group who interviews the Chinese students, since they could show their works of translation confidently before they know the original version.

Poem Study (1): When Traditional Poem Crashes into Modern Technology

The textbook our school uses for intermediate Mandarin class is Traveling in China 1 by Yuhong Zheng. After introducing the Pinyin, this book starts directly with several groups of characters learning instead of making simple conversations. I think this book is good for my students since the class is an intermediate level, the students more or less have some basic conversational skills, so they are ready at least for writing some simple characters. Another good thing about this book is, along with characters, it also has several Chinese poems that contain the characters, which I think is a great idea to make the characters learning not that boring!

While the only shortage of this book is, it doesn’t plan out a detailed instruction on how to teach the poems. I can’t just let my students read the poems and translate them into Chinese for them word by word, especially for my ACTIVE 7th graders. So in this case, if a lecture doesn’t work, group work and self-exploring might be worthy to try.

So here was what I did. The poem that we studied for that day was “春晓” (Spring Morning) by 孟浩然 (Haoran Meng), and I divided the whole class into three groups, with 2 groups of 3 and 1 group of 4. In general, the task for the three groups were the same, which were trying to figure out the meaning of the poem word by word through google translation. Since usually, the sentences will make no sense if they are translated from Chinese to English word by word, the students have to translate it in a “better” English according to their own understandings. After they finished their general task, each of those groups also had their special task. The first group needed to look up the information about the author, the second group was asked to find out the rhythm and the third group was supposed to come up with a new name for the poem! After all the groups finished their tasks, they presented their works to the whole class.

Here were several concerns when I designed this activity. First of all, group work! My intermediate Mandarin class is composed of students with different personalities and learning habits. Most of them are so active and everyone wants to stand out and does not really know how to cooperate with each other. I grouped them myself, and put those who were active and those who were not together to balance the groups. It turned out that most of the groups worked together pretty well and the students dedicated themselves into the tasks for most of the time. Another thought was I asked students to use the google translation to study the poem by themselves. One of the concerns was that some the old teaching methods such as read the poem and then translate might not work efficiently nowadays especially for my 7th grade students and in the world where is full of technologies. There are tons of thousands of information that people can get through internet everyday, and students are also very curious about what they can get from the virtual world. However, you may criticize that google translate may lead students into a wrong place, since what has been translated by google usually makes no sense to native speakers. That’s the point! Students should guess the meaning of the poem through the fragments of the translation that they get from google, which definitely makes the process of learning poems more interesting. Most importantly, students need to compare their translations with the translation from the textbook. From this activity, you not only can let students know that google translate is not always reliable, but also have your students to experience how are Chinese and English sentences different from each other.

Here are the works that have been done by my students:

Teaching Tips 教学小贴士:

1. When using google translate, you may ask students to translate word by word instead of copy and paste the whole sentences at the same time, since they may get no answer for the whole sentence and may skip the meanings of some important words.