Miss Wang graduated from Tam-Kang University as an English major at about 15 years ago (for politeness sake, I didn’t really ask the exact questions concerning about “time”J ) and started teaching not long after she got teachers’ license.  I was invited to observe her make-up teaching the day I had my interview with her.  Miss Wang teaches 7^th grade, and I think she’s really a “7^th -grade-expert” with the belief that success begins with good starts. 

Understanding how confused these new comers would feel with a lot of homework suddenly descending on their life and how fear, anxiety, and laziness would stop the students from hard-working, Miss Wang courageously chose to play the “black face”, pushing each students to achieve the learning goals she set up everyday before letting students go home.  Miss Wang’s teaching philosophy is as simple as a sentence: “Never give up the students, even after they have given up themselves!”  Miss Wang spends at least 2 hours every day with her homeroom students before letting them go.  You think this is a torture for the students?  I’ll tell you, surprisingly, it’s NOT.  I’ve interviewed some of Miss Wang’s students about staying 2 more hours than other students, all of them chuckled, “We are happy to stay here!” “I love Miss Wang because she really cares about us so that she spends time on us.” “Sometimes Miss Wang gets angry with us and becomes fierce, but that’s because we do something wrong, and that’s how I got a chance to know I am doing things wrong and improve myself.”  With such a severe leading style, Miss Wang’s class has won countless prizes; the class is not only outstanding in their school works, but also their behavior.

Miss Wang’s way of teaching English is not so different from other teachers, as far as I am concerned.  But there’s something special in her teaching that she spent a lot of effort pushing students to speak.  Sometimes the students just follow her; other times, they have to practice in groups, and that makes the class more interesting than usual.  This picture is taken while students were walking around in the classroom and finding different partners to practice with.  This activity is not actually a game but a kind of practice for students to open up their mouths and decrease students’ fear in speaking. 

When asked about the barriers and supports in the process and teaching, Miss Wang just smiled and said softly: “I don’t really remember any huge barriers in my teaching. Even if there is, I’ have the responsibility to solve the problems, be it extrinsic or my own emotional ones.  Of course, the best support for me is all the interactions with my students, whose tiny improvements day by day remind me to realize my teaching philosophy from the very beginning: Never give up! ”

Miss Wang’s optimistic attitude deeply impresses me.  “Never give up” is an often quoted sentence in teachers’ profiles, but through Miss Wang’s teaching, I see how this sentence is put into practice and how much one has to pay to realize these words. We may expect teachers to prepare a lot of activities for students to make the class feel as happy as possible in the process of learning, but through Miss Wang’s example, I realized something else significant: without the teachers’ sincerity, more dazzling games would seem futile; while on the contrary, sincerity and enthusiasm drives the teachers to conjure as many good activities as he/she can!