3A 2010-2011: Welcome to 3A! By Mr. Alan Cheng

Welcome to 3A! This is Mr. Alan Cheng, one of 3A’s class teachers along with Ms. Dawn Ho. I’ve set up this blog because I would like a place for us to keep our happy memories in S3. I hope it can also act as a communication bridge between teachers and students as well as school and home. Both the students’ and I will take turns to update the blog. Therefore, I warmly invite parents to regularly visit this blog to keep updated about what’s happening in the students’ school life.

Highlights of the week:

So, we’ve been back to school for a week and a half now, and I’ve seen all 3A students at least twice a day. I’m starting to recognise faces and have learnt some (but not all) the names of the students.

Of course for me, I should write about the English lessons. I believe that these lessons have been an interesting learning experience for both the students and I, as we are slowly learning about how each other works. As I’ve told the class already, my biggest goal this year is to improve the speaking ability of all students, in particular, help them to acquire a more native-like English accent. It is going to be tough, but I hope that both students and parents can trust me and believe that I can achieve it. The first step to that will be to keep the English-only environment in English lessons. The phrase I’ve said the most this week is “English! English please! I still hear Chinese!!” I hope this situation will slowly improve over time as the students get used to speaking to each other in English in order to push each other to improve their spoken English.

As you may know, I also teach 3A’s life-education. In the first lesson, I did a self-introduction to the students and told them many things about me that even some of my colleagues may not know! I hope this can develop our trust in each other, which is a vital part of life-education. Further, I mentioned some of my key values and passions in life in the hope that the students can develop their own set of core values and passions. I hope the students found this lesson both interesting and stimulating.

Happiest moment:
Although 3A and I have only known each other for about a week, but I believe that we have already started to develop good rapport. I have been relatively happy being both the class and English teacher of 3A. I have also been really impressed with 3A’s girls’ exemplary performance in class so far. Yet, my happiest moment actually came from the boys. On one particular day, the class got 7 in the classroom log (I set a minimum expectation of 8 for 3A), and the boys approached me and admitted to misbehaving before I asked them to explain the situation. It seems like a very simple thing, but I saw it as a big act of honesty and a willingness to admit mistakes from the boys. As I told them, the important thing is not what the mistake was, but instead how we act after the mistake has happened. I hope we all learnt a lesson from this mistake!

Quote of the week:
A failure is not a failure until we admit to it.