My fave song – Tangled-When Will My Life Begin?

Native Speaker Visits in My Class

                      

These pics are some of native speakers visits I have in my class. We have them every 3 months. Native speakers are not only “bule (foreigners with blue eyes and blond hair)” who come to my class to speak English, but they come with knowledge that they bring from their home countries. They share cross cultural values and new horizons for my students. My students are always interested to have the native visits in my class.

Love is In The Classroom

Students in my class

I almost never realize that I have been teaching for more than ten years by now. Every single day in the classroom is an enjoyable moment. Every minute is fun and interesting. Teaching makes my life.  Ten years seem only several hours full of love.

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Public Speaking Strategies

How To Give A Talk: Better Academic Speaking in a Nutshell
by Mark Clark, Oregon Institute of Technology  &   Paul N. Edwards, University of Michigan

(Please feel free to print this document.  Do give credit to the authors when using this paper in your classes, seminars, etc.)

The Awful Academic Talk
You’ve seen it a hundred times.
The speaker approaches the head of the room and sits down at the table (You can’t see him through the heads in front of you). He begins to read from a paper, speaking in a soft monotone (You can hardly hear – soon you are nodding off). Sentences are long, complex, and filled with jargon. The speaker emphasizes complicated details (You rapidly lose the thread of the talk). With five minutes left in the session, the speaker suddenly looks at his watch. He announces – in apparent surprise – that he’ll have to omit the most important points because time is running out. He shuffles papers, becoming flustered and confused (You do to, if you are still awake). He drones on. Fifteen minutes after the scheduled end of the talk, the host reminds the speaker to finish for the third time. The speaker trails off inconclusively and asks for questions (Thin, polite applause from an audience relieved the experience is overfinally rouses you from dreamland).

Why do otherwise brilliant people give such soporific talks?

One reason is stage fright. It’s easier to hide behind the armor of a written paper, which you have had plenty of time to think through, than simply to talk. This is a perfectly understandable reaction, and in some circumstances, it’s still the best thing to do.

But a much more important reason is that this kind of boring, incomprehensible talk has somehow become part of academic culture. Graduate students may actually learn it from their professors. One reason this has happened is the dominance of written language in academic culture. Although writing and public speaking are very different arts, it has become acceptable to treat public speaking as a mere reading of a written text. Ironically, rhetoric – the skill of persuasive oral argumentation – is one of the most ancient academic disciplines, dating to Plato’s and the like.

Stage fright is something everybody has to handle in their own way. But academic culture is something we can deliberately change. This article reviews the principles of academic public speaking, in hopes of contributing to long-term improvement of our norms, and to help you do better when you compete for the Robinson Prize.

Principles of Effective Talks
Any effective talk must do three things: communicate your arguments and ideas, persuade your audience they are true, and be interesting and entertaining. In our obsession with persuasive argumentation, academics sometimes forget about the third item on the list. Some people feel it follows automatically from the first two (it doesn’t). Some even scoff at the goal itself. Perversely, we seem have come to believe that if a talk is entertaining, it’s robably not very deep.

Posted by Dwi from Uhamka.

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Insights

Today Allah showed me a lot. And it made me think. First I learnt that being intelligent and having a lot of experience will not make a good educator if she/he doesn’t have patience. In all levels all education, even a professor needs to have patience. Learning is a process. Expecting a good result in a day is impossible. For me patience is like a sparkle. Maybe we do not see what we want to see from our students. But we give short of lights, and hopefully now or later(and we don’t know when), the sparkles will grow bigger..and bigger…and finally become fire. I hope I will always be a patient teacher.