Teacher Personality

Almost anyone can become a teacher, but it takes a special person to be a great teacher. To inspire not just a great student, but a great person, a teacher must rise above the crowd and make a lasting impression. So what does a student remember for years to come? Which characteristics make a great teacher?

Empathy

A great teacher is sensitive to their students’ needs. On a child’s first day of kindergarten, when they are crying for their parents and refusing to participate in class, a great teacher sits with them until they calm down. In middle school, when a child enters adolescence, overwhelmed by learning --- not just academics, but learning about themselves --- a great teacher is patient, understanding and available to talk. And in high school and college, when faced with the task of planning their future, a student looks for a teacher to provide insight and wisdom.

Enthusiasm

Why should a student be excited about learning when their teacher is not excited about teaching? No teacher can be great without loving what they do. To excite and inspire a student requires excitement and a passion for the material itself. Enthusiasm is contagious. All it takes for a student to get excited about going to class is a teacher who is excited and whose positive energy fills the classroom.

Creativity

Creativity is key to captivating a student. So often when someone reflects on their education, they remember a particular moment in the classroom that stayed with them. They remember when a teacher turned the table of elements into a rap or used an episode of The Real World to illustrate an invaluable life lesson. They remember the group projects that involved more painting than writing, the role-plays and the fun games to test their knowledge. Showing a student something they haven’t seen before --- even showing them something familiar but in a new way --- is the surest way to leave an impression that lasts for years.

Think-Pair Share Strategy

What is Think, Pair, Share?

Think-Pair-Share is a strategy designed to provide students with "food for thought" on a given topics enabling them to formulate individual ideas and share these ideas with another student. It is a learning strategy developed by Lyman and associates to encourage student classroom participation. Rather than using a basic recitation method in which a teacher poses a question and one student offers a response, Think-Pair-Share encourages a high degree of pupil response and can help keep students on task.

What is its purpose?

• Providing "think time" increases quality of student responses.
• Students become actively involved in thinking about the concepts presented in the lesson.
• Research tells us that we need time to mentally "chew over" new ideas in order to store them in memory. When teachers present too much information all at once, much of that information is lost. If we give students time to "think-pair-share" throughout the lesson, more of the critical information is retained.
• When students talk over new ideas, they are forced to make sense of those new ideas in terms of their prior knowledge. Their misunderstandings about the topic are often revealed (and resolved) during this discussion stage.
• Students are more willing to participate since they don't feel the peer pressure involved in responding in front of the whole class.
• Think-Pair-Share is easy to use on the spur of the moment.
• Easy to use in large classes.

Games for English Learners

English learning games are an essential part of classroom management, even at intermediate and advanced levels of instruction. Games keep students awake, and can help review old material, as well as introduce and practice new material. Games for intermediate and advanced English learners can even be more fun than beginners' games, since the instructions and subject matter can be more complex.

1.     Jigsaw Story

This activity is great for practicing sequencing, but it is also useful for general reading comprehension. Play in small groups. Type up a short story (6 to 10 sentences) in individual lines, and then cut them apart. Give each member of the group 2 to 3 sentences. Each student reads her sentences aloud, and the group tries to put the story in order. The first group to put it together properly wins.

2.      Alphabet Practice

Have the class stand up and form a circle. Say a word; students then will go around the circle saying a word that starts with the same letter. Anyone who misses sits down for the rest of the round. If your class is small, go around the circle two or three times using the same first letter. This game should be fast-paced, so don't allow any one student to think for too long. For very advanced students, make the game more challenging by requiring the words to fit into two categories (e.g., they must have same first letter and be a verb).

How to Teach English to Beginner Students

Teaching English to individuals who are learning it as an additional language can feel intimidating. However, it can be done, even if your classroom has a group of individuals who speak Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish and other languages. You don't have to know one word of your students' languages to teach English, although learning the word for "welcome" is always a good idea.

Instructions

1.      Assess your students using an informal technique. Even in a beginning class, you will notice students listen to and speak English at varying levels of proficiency. Do not assume anything. Some students may have come directly from a rural part of their country and may not know how to hold a pencil. Others may already know a few common phrases but have no knowledge of the English phonetic system. Ask students their names and where they live. See whether they can write it down. This will give you an idea of the comfort level that each individual has with English.

2.      Teach English to beginners in the following order: listening, speaking, reading and writing. In a beginning English class, you'll be doing very little writing. The writing that you do should focus primarily on English survival skills, such as writing names, addresses and phone numbers.

3.      Use a technique called Total Physical Response (TPR). According to James J. Asher, who developed this technique, TPR is "a strategy to introduce the language through the use of commands and has students demonstrate their understanding through action responses."

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Give students simple commands, such as "Pick up your pencil." Demonstrate the action that you are doing after you say it. Indicate that students should follow suit. Say the command again. Ask students to repeat it. This technique will enable you to teach vocabulary naturally.

The Origin of Landak River

Literary Critism

Long time ago, lived a farmer and his wife in a village by the side of a forest. They lived simply and they like to help other people, especially one who in afflictions. One night, the farmer and his wife were resting in their house. The farmer was sitting beside his sleeping wife. Suddenly, a white centipede came out from the wife’s head. The farmer was amazed. He then followed the centipede until they reach a small pond not far from their house. Then the centipede suddenly disappeared. The farmer went home and found his wife still soundly asleep.

            In the morning, the wife told his husband about the dream she had last night. “I was walking through a vast field, and I came to a lake. I saw a giant hedgehog in the lake. It was glaring at me, so I ran away.” After he heard his wife’s dream, the farmer went back to the small pond. In the pond, he saw something very shiny. He came to the shiny object and took it. It was a golden hedgehog statue. It was very beautiful. Its eyes were made of diamond. The farmer then brought the statue home.

            At night, the farmer had a dream. A giant hedgehog came to him, “Please let me stay in your home. As return, I will give you everything you want. Just caress the statue’s head and say the prayer. There are two kinds of prayers, one is to start your wish and the second is to stop your wish. Now memorize the prayers.”

In the next day, the farmer told his wife about his dream. They really wanted to prove it. The farmer slowly caressed the statue's head. He said the prayer and asked for rice. Suddenly, rice came out of the mouth of the statue. The rice kept on coming out from the statue's mouth. The farmer immediately said the prayer to stop it. The rice then stopped coming out from the statue.

            The farmer and his wife then asked for other things, jewelry and other stuff they needed. They became very rich. But they still like to help other people. A lot of poor came to them for help. Unfortunately, a thief found out about the secret of the golden hedgehog statue. Pretending to be a poor asking for help, he stole the statue from the farmer’s house.

The thief blurred to the district area of Ngabang. There was a drought in the area. The thief wanted sympathy from the people, so he said to them that he would provide them with water. The thief then caressed the hedgehog statue and said the prayer. Water came out of the statue’s mouth. All the people were so happy. But the water kept on coming out. The thief didn’t know the prayer to stop the wish. People who saw the incident were really scared. They ran away to avoid the water as it was started to flood the area. The thief also wanted to run away, but he cannot move his legs. In his vision, there was a giant hedgehog holding both his legs. Water kept coming from the statue and slowly it became a river. The thief was drowned in the river. People then named the river as Sungai Landak (Hedgehog river).

Characters

1. The farmer                  : kind, love to help other people, not tightfisted
2. The farmer’s wife       : kind, love to help other people, not tightfisted
3. The hedgehog giant   
4. The thief                      : careless, greedy

Criticism

•      The ending of the story is not clear, the readers do not know the destiny of farmer and his wife.

•      The story is fiction (oral literature), there is no statue that can play role as God who manage a world and granted a pray.

Moral Value

•      Something we own that misused because we do not know how to use it in order will create disaster for others and ourselves. In other words, we should use all the things we have in a right way and for a good purposes

•      As humans, we must not be greedy. We should not be doing something just for the reward because in the end it will bring us to the suffering.

•      We must do something with sincerity rather than because want to praise by other people.