The beliefs of a school teacher, put, into practice, from the Newspapers, translated…
A lot of children after falling behind on their lessons lacked the motivations to catch up again, the math instructor from Sanxia Elementary School in Hsinbei City used the ideas of “nourishing the children’s minds and bodies”, not only did she take money out of her own pockets to get the snacks prepared for her class, fulfilling the stomachs of her classroom full of children; she’d also used her own set of materials that she’d written up, to ignite that desire to learn in them, she was voted as the model teacher for the Department of Education’s “Educators’ Blog”.
Chen recalled, that the first help session in math she’d held, only three students showed up for it, and, it might have been, that the students feared getting labeled, that they’d only come willingly after school, than to show up for the help sessions. She’d started thinking of ways to get the attendance rates up, prepared the snacks for them, to give them an external motivation for coming to class, “at four in the afternoon, the children are hungry, with the snacks, they will come, willingly, to class, and they’d even shared with me which shops have the foods they enjoyed so I can buy some next time.”
Later on, her afterschool help session increased to over twenty students, she’d once needed to hold two separate classes. Chen said, in order for the remedial sessions to work, the primary rule was that the kids are willing to come, then, using effective ways to teach, to help the students find their own motivations for learning. That the effective teaching, first needed to “diagnose”, to know where the students needed the extra help on, to help the students learn the bits and pieces of the lessons that they’d not yet mastered up, then, the students can, catch up afterwards really quickly.
Chen stated, that so long as the instructors have the mind, giving materials that are manageable to the students, the students wanting to learn, that after school, when they go home, they’d still carried on the learning, there’s a high rate of success.
Song (a false name) who is already in middle school was originally a loner, isn’t articulate enough, a bit stubborn in nature, and when the class split up into groups, he was always the one left out, he’d made bad grades, and had never made a passing grade in mathematics. As he’d entered into the help classes back in the fifth grade, Song was with absolutely NO self-confidence, although he had already mastered the basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division properties, but he couldn’t do those problems with the words in the problems at all.
Not being able to understand what the question is asking is a common problem for students who couldn’t do well in math, Chen, used her own teaching materials, accompanied Song from understand what the problems were asking, to getting the key points of the questions, labeling the keywords, using pictures to express the questions, Song was slowly, making progress. Once after class, Song was so eager to show her his math exams, told her he’d made a “90” on it!
Recalling back, Chen said that “Song didn’t know, that as I saw his eyes glowed, I was, even MORE excited than he had been, happier too!”
So, this, is the dedications of a school instructor, she’d set up the help sessions, to give assistance, the extra help needed by the students who weren’t getting the math problems in class, and, she’d also provided these kids with more than just the foods, which she’d paid out of her own pockets, she’d shown them, that someone DOES care, and that, was how she was able to, reach the students, helping them do better in school, because this woman CARED about her students!