恭喜发财！Happy new year of the dragon!
Welcome to this blog in which I hope to give you a flavour of life as a high school Mandarin teacher. I recently trained as a teacher after a career in the civil service (Foreign Office and Home Office), and am lucky enough to teach in a school with Mandarin on the curriculum from Year 7. I share the teaching with a Taiwanese colleague, and this year we have our first year starting GCSE.
The start of Chinese new year last week was an opportunity not only for Mandarin students, but for the whole school to learn more about Chinese culture and customs. We decorated the languages block with posters and lanterns, had Chinese food (with a menu in characters) in the canteen, and emailed a new year quiz to the whole school. The response was tremendous – some students told me they were waiting in the library before school to receive the quiz; another logged on from home, even though she was off sick; our Chinese science teacher admitted to having to Google some of the answers! The winners received ‘hong bao’ containing White Rabbit sweets (very popular) and a house point.
Thanks to the HSBC advert, many more students knew about ‘hong bao’ – but it took some highly leading questions to tease out why HSBC might be using Chinese themes in its adverts.
All our Mandarin classes, except one, enjoyed lessons about new year. The exception, sadly, was the Year 10 GCSE class which is in the middle of its first written controlled assessment (15% of the GCSE marks). They have nearly completed their six hours’ preparation to write 100 – 150 characters about the topic given to them. They will have one hour for the writing, with access to a dictionary and a planning sheet with up to 40 characters on it. (Exams have changed enormously since my ‘O’ levels many years ago…)
This evening is Year 10 parents’ evening, which I am looking forward to. The class has a wide range of abilities, but the students are all highly-motivated, and are a real pleasure to teach. I am sure I will enjoy the evening!
