August 15, 2005

The Mysterious Cartoon Animal

It's kinda sad that I find my patience level wearing thin at an alarming speed whenever I teach Chinese - a language I adore. I was helping my girl with her revision in Chinese for her CA2 this evening. Towards the last half hour or so, I truly felt my blood pressure going up. I took a lot of deep breaths just to stay patient and not shake my head resignedly. And you know, this girl is already one of the better ones I ever coached for Chinese.

Just HOW do you teach a language when the kid has truly limited sense of the language and (whatever has the school teacher been doing...) does not know her radicals and tonal changes of the hanyu pinyin?

Teaching Chinese just makes me feel old cos I kept sighing. Bblics said she felt that comparison between the kids' era (of our time, juggling with English and Chinese and of the time now, juggling miserably with English and Chinese) is always unfair and leads to a feeling of degeneration. The kind of degeneration that I'm more concerned with is my own physical and mental ones. It occurs whenever I attempt to do coaching in this subject that I like.

MOE, hear this. For all that you've been trying to pull M.T from the slumps, it has only sank deeper. The uphill climb has never been steeper, and will be steeper.

Posted by 杏 cy （Jancy） at 23:08