I have to say, this is a good week not to be back in Colorado.

It looks like bystanders are getting herded up, too.
And what’s up with the storm trooper look?

Today, a prospective teacher who came in to visit my first and second grade class seemed genuinely impressed with the amount of material they’ve learned so far. They came as complete beginners, and they’ve been in my EFL classes for six hours a week for just under a year, doing the Up and Away series.

I made a comment about how one of my students really struggled with his reading compared to the rest of the class, and the visiting teacher told me that the kid was equivalent to third year students at his school. Then, he went on to ask me several detailed questions about how my students had made so much progress in a single year. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to answer everything before I had to get ready for my next class.

Sharing

I had planned to email my thoughts to him directly, but then it occurred to me that others might have the same questions. Undoubtedly, some readers will have differing opinions, and that’s fine. However, if my ideas help a few teachers and a few more students, then I’m more than happy to share them.

The Main Ideas

Don’t burden beginners with a 100% English classroom

This should be self-explanatory. With only six hours a week of class time, complete beginners need support via their first language. The goal isn’t to minimize the amount of Chinese they use in class; it’s to maximize the amount of English they use. This makes a huge difference and it’s worth it, even though it requires a teacher with more language skills.

Motivate the students

In many ways, motivation is the single most important factor in teaching. Every great teacher I’ve studied has been a master at it. If your students aren’t at least trying do to whatever class activities you give them, then the rest is a loss. Personally, I’ve gotten the best results from using a multi-pronged approach. If the kids don’t do what they should be doing, there are consequences. On the other hand, when they go the extra mile, there are rewards. Quick 1 minute motivational speeches here and there also go a long way.

Teach Phonics.. thoroughly

Teaching phonics takes time. There’s no doubt about that. Just getting students to the point where they can hear the difference between the various long and short vowel sounds, the “ar”, “er/ir/ur”, “or/ore/oar”, “air/are”, “ear/eer”, “ire/ier”, “ure”, and “ow/ou” sounds can easily take a couple of months. The “ng” sounds (i.e. “rang” v.s. “rain”) are a nightmare for many Taiwanese people. And after that, it takes dozens of phonics rules before students can reliably sound out most English words they see or spell out words they hear.

This time is well spent, though. Teaching phonics will help students improve their listening skills, will improve their pronunciation, and it will help them read unfamiliar words. Without implementing a serious phonics curriculum, it’s difficult to use Dr. Seuss books or other books for English speaking children. With good phonics, though, the kids learn a lot reading them and they love them.

Don’t make the students memorize huge spelling lists

Unfortunately, an obsession with spelling runs rampant through east Asian EFL. Worse still, it takes a lot of time to get eight year-olds to be able to accurately spell a list of twenty words. Rather than making an effort to do so, I just keep teaching them more material. Comprehension is necessary before I’ll go on. Perfect spelling isn’t.

Maybe while the students are on the Level 2 Up & Away book, they have problems spelling half or even two thirds of the words in the book, but a few months later, they’ll already be on book 4 and they’ll find they can spell quite a few more of the words from book 2. As their phonics skills improve, their mistakes become more and more like those of native speakers (e.g. misspelling “meal” as “meel” rather than as “mil”), and as they read more their mistakes become less frequent.

Get the students reading actual stories ASAP

I can’t emphasize enough how important reading is. It’s the single easiest way for kids to get more English input. It reinforces all the grammar and vocabulary they’ve learned, and they usually enjoy it, too.

Keep notes

If you notice most of your students have the same problem, then it’s probably your fault, not theirs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s related to grammar, pronunciation, reading skills, or even classroom behavior. If the majority of the class has the problem then it’s your job as a teacher to find a way to fix it.

Periodically reviewing your notes and looking for things to improve makes all the difference in the long run.

Recently, I’ve been getting more and more bogged down in my EFL curriculum work. It’s a very rough process, but even so it’s become unwieldy. The problem is the way I’m keeping track of vocabulary words.

Frequency is key

Whenever I create a new lesson, I have to choose vocabulary items to introduce. Rather than do so on a strictly topical basis, I’ve opted to focus on usage frequency. In particular, I do everything within reason to teach the headwords used for the Oxford Bookworms series of graded readers. Extensive reading is possibly the single most important part of our program, and it’s worth it to make a few sacrifices to get the kids reading actual books as soon as possible.

Spreadsheets can save time

In order to keep track of everything, I’ve made a big spreadsheet for all the vocabulary items in the curriculum. One field is the word itself, another field represents which lesson I teach it in, another is the Bookworms level in which it first appears. The Chinese translation is in still another field, and there’s one final one for any notes I might have about the vocab item. I can sort this spreadsheet by column headers to see the words taught in a given lesson, or all the adjectives taught between any given lessons, or any number of other useful combination. It’s great for making review sheets for my students.

Spreadsheets still aren’t perfect, though

So what’s the problem? The problem is that I started the list with only level one Bookworms words. Before, when I made new lessons, I used to look through the remaining level one words and choose the most appropriate group of them I could. After exhausting the level one list, things got a bit tougher. Now, when make a new lesson, that means adding new words to my master spreadsheet. Obviously, I want to add level 2 words, but sometimes there’s a word that just has to be added regardless of where it appears in the Oxford frequency lists. When that happens, I have to hunt through the list of words that appear in level two readers. If the word I’m looking for isn’t there, I have to look through the level three list, and then the level four list. It sucks.

Worse still, if I were to just copy the entire level 2 list into my master spreadsheet, there would be hundreds of duplicates, which would take hours to remove by hand. No good. Especially since the task would just become all the more unmanageable when it was time to add the level 3 list into my master spreadsheet.

Aha! I’ll just whip up a quick program to parse my excel file and remove duplicates!

Ha! What a fool I was! After spending hours pounding my head against my computer desk, I came to the realization that the excel file format is pure evil. It has decades of cruft that hark back to the days in which desktops had less computing power than my sports watch! And it won’t yield its information gracefully! Had the .xls file format been the result of one particular person, I’d have said his decision making skills rivaled those of Easter Island native who said, “I know! Let’s cut down the last tree and commit suicide because we need more identical statues!“.

Finally, I came to my senses, saved the list as text file and wrote a quick python script to read the vocabulary list into a few big arrays of strings, and then it was easy to remove duplicates:

for i in range(0, len(b2words)-1):
	for w in l2words:
		if w == b2words[i]:
			del b2words[i]
			del b2pos[i]

Then I output my list of level two bookworms (that aren’t duplicates of any words already in my curriculum) into a simple text file, and the part of speech information into another text file. Finally, I used my good friends cut and paste to add them into my master spreadsheet and I set the Bookworm level for the whole group to two.

Why, oh why couldn’t I have thought of that solution before 4 a.m.?

There’s nothing worse than the feeling of waking up, rolling over to the side, seeing a big spider on the wall, gasping and seeing the thing motor across the wall. I swear, these things are faster than cockroaches.

Just what kind of spider is this that can move so f@#$ing fast? Is it poisonous? Can the thing zip up to me, pump necrotoxins into me and then disappear in a blur? I’m no fan of spiders, but nothing creepy should be this fast.

Fortunately, it seems the geckos have driven these eight-legged bundles of energy off… for now.

This, after their earnings report came out SIMO dropped by over a third of its total valuation. It was a significantly undervalued stock to begin with, and it’s still a fast growing company. The NAND problems notwithstanding, I see SIMO as a long-term grower. As usual the market has an unreasonably short-term focus. At its current valuation, I couldn’t justify not buying any SIMO stock.

If necessary, I’ll sell some of my stake in BWLD. Buffalo Wild Wings has been executing its expansion well, but its price has also gone up over 50% since in invested earlier this year and the holding has grown to over 20% of my entire portfolio.

Right now, SIMO is trading at a P/E of under 6, and a price/book ratio of under 0.9!

Update:
07/31/2008 Bought 175 SIMO @ 7.42

Remember, you are responsible for your own investment decisions! See the disclaimer.

I’ve always loved our bookcase at the school. It’s functional, it looks nice, and it actually draws in our students. None of my previous English teaching jobs in Taiwan have had anything even remotely like it. Some schools have had a mostly ignored bookcase full of things that are way too hard for the students, but not books that the students actually read.

In some ways our bookcase was a symbol of my long struggle to set up an extensive reading program. Ron, to his credit, was the most open and reasonable boss I’ve ever had. He actually read the entire Day and Bamford book on extensive reading that I lent him. In the end, though, I wanted to take reading a bit further than he did. After deciding to move to Pagewood, I finally had the chance.

It’s also a nice bookcase. It’s wide, it can hold a lot of books and it lays pretty nicely against the wall. That’s why it was worth it for Simon and I carry it all the way from our old building to the new one and then take it up to the eleventh floor via the stairs. I must have sweat out 3kg water during the trip and my forearms still haven’t recovered, but look!

Our students have their old bookcase back.

I’m fried. Peeling, too. I went to Yilan last weekend with Wayne and Eric and played in the sun all day. It was a long day, but it was just the way to end summer break.
Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I’ve found myself in a position to be hiring EFL teachers for the first time. While I did gain some management experience as the owner of a three crew house painting business back when I was trying to pay my way through college, this is mostly uncharted territory for me. With the house painting, training was brief, and I was only looking for short-term help throughout the summer months. Some degree of physical exertion was involved– carrying 30 gallon tubs of paint, climbing ladders, walking around on slanted rooftops and that sort of thing.

My current search for an EFL teacher, on the other hand, is nearly the opposite. I’m looking for a long-term hire, someone who will build up from part time into a full time position and stay at it for at least three years, there’s not much physical exertion involved at all, it’s far more intellectually demanding, and people skills are of primary importance.

The Applicants

I’ve started looking well in advance. We have some good teachers now, and they aren’t at a full schedule. It’s a good thing, too. This might be a lengthy search. I put up an ad both on this site and on a free Taiwan classifieds board, and the applications have been streaming in. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the people emailing me resumes have been woefully unqualified for the position. Of course, I’ll respect the privacy of all our applicants, but here are a few general examples:

People not even in the same country

It’s difficult for me to understand how someone living in Toronto who can’t speak Chinese at all, has no teaching experience and wants to “try Taiwan” could see himself as a good match for the following:

“Need a dedicated, professional Chinese-speaking N. American teacher. Long-term position.”

People unwilling to meet stated requirements

I can understand how someone who is a little weak in one area, but motivated would take a shot and hope for the best. An applicant with weaker Chinese skills could study intensively prior to opening classes and make it. Someone who only has 6 months of prior teaching experience rather than a year, might be able to make up for that inexperience through hard work. But if an ad says extensive training is involved and the applicants have to be willing to work Monday through Saturday, it’s a bit unreasonable to apply just for one class time slot and be unwilling to train first!

Short-term mercenaries

To an extent, I can understand why a prospective employee would want to get as much money as possible for as little work as possible from the very beginning. In general, everyone wants the best deal they can get. I suspect that the reason so many people looking for this job are looking for the best short-term deals they can get are due to the low-trust nature of the job market for teaching English in Asia. Local message boards are full of horror stories about bosses who promise the stars and renege once they’ve got leverage over their teachers. I’m sure that many of the stories are true, but it’s so bad that many foreigners I know living in Taiwan discount job bonuses completely when they evaluate potential schools. If people think the raise and bonus system is some sort of scam, they won’t be willing to put in the work necessary to get started. Maybe in a year or two, when I have a teacher making well in excess of 100k/month and telling his friends, then recruitment will be easier. For now, sadly, there isn’t much I can do to make applicants trust me.

The Interviews

So far, everyone who has actually come in for an interview has been a pretty good candidate. Obviously, no one has all the necessary skills before training begins, but I’m happy with the people I’ve seen so far. More than anything, they seem to have a genuine interest in education.

The difficult part will be finding someone looking for a long-term position. Most EFL teachers are understandably cautious about taking a multi-year position.

All this past week, I’ve been on summer break, minus a few entrance tests and other odds and ends to do in the office. Something odd happened while I was giving one.

Some Kiwi girl called the school and asked for me by name. I had never met her before and I had no idea how she had the school’s phone number. She said she was still in NZ and just wanted to ask me “a few questions” about living in Taiwan. Seeing as how I probably would have made a similar call when I was 22 and looking into working in Japan, I tried to help her as much as I could, but it was a little odd.

She had all kinds of questions– was it true that people of Chinese ancestry can never get EFL jobs? Where is a good place to live? Where can teachers find jobs? What are the types of cram schools? How is it?

I have to say I was a bit overwhelmed. I told her to save some money before coming and suggested she check out forumosa.com. I also kind of wonder if she found me through this web page somehow and if so, why didn’t she didn’t read any of the stuff I’ve written about teaching and put on the front page?

Update: I just realized she probably got the school number from the jobs page.

I found this sentence on a social aggregator the other day:

James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.

The sentence is grammatically correct, but only madness would lead anyone to diagram it. Even with punctuation it’s a bit difficult for some to parse:

James, while John had had “had”, had had “had had”; “had had” had had a better effect on the teacher.

John wrote “had” and James wrote “had had”. The teacher liked “had had” more.

It strikes me as sorely unjust that this kind of madness parses, but harmlessly nesting a few parenthesis is taboo.