This is the reunion of TPAN. This time we meet other English teachers in Taipei County as trainees and have Caroline, Ayomi and Rushmi to be our trainers, Today is the third day of the program and, strangely, I get several teachers asking me how old I am or what year I was born in. I asked them why they ask me the question since I haven’t talked to some of them yet. They said that I look very young. I’m happy about it and I feel safer to be around the senior and the more experienced.

  I have my first English class in cram school today and I must say that junior high school students are much more serious than I thought. They seldom laugh, smile less and response little. I don’t know if they feel nervous or uncomfortable on our first meeting or they just behave this way. After class, the students and other teachers come and talk to me. There’s an ABC who can barely speak in Chinese telling the other teacher that my English is very good because I have a very good pronunciation. Feeling a bit happy about that, I still wonder how to make the class more active.

Well, technically it’s only the last week that the article is supposed to talk about but I’m going to record the last week and my thoughts about the whole cycle in TPAN as well.

We have a very interesting and exciting activity, which requires us to give a one-minute speech on stage right after picking a topic. Mine is PILOT. My speech is lousy, I think, but my fellow classmates still give me a big hand.

      I got a call from Chief of Information Technology Section today. He asked about my will to be an informational technology teacher. I’m a little honored to be asked about it, however; I just rekindle my interests in learning and teaching English from TPAN Program. I’m not going to spoil the opportunity to renew my enthusiasm of both learning and teaching English. So I turn him down and I hope I won’t be regretful in the future. Somehow I think being an informational technology teacher is also a very challenging and interesting job to a mouse potato like me. Right now I’m open to every possibility and challenge. Let’s pray my passion in teaching English, which is easy to lose during the semester ,can last the whole summer vacation.

I’m a little pissed off by one of my group members. While we discuss the Talent Show, she keeps telling us what to do and not to do. Giving advices is helpful, but all she thinks about is cutting the games and activities and forcing us to hold her famous motto “I just want a lowpass.” Yesterday while we discussed the invention, she closed her eyes resting and did nothing contributed to the group. Now she wants us to do this and do that in an easy ,should we say lazy and convenient, way? I don’t think so. Just spending three weeks within the group, I’ve already found several characteristics teachers tend to have, such as being dominating, uncooperative, indifferent and boring. Why can't she , like what we teachers always preach to the students, just do her best and enjoy all the fun? Humph! They’re also a bunch of grumblers!

This weak has been a torture for TPAN participants because we’re told to shut the AC up during the graduation ceremony rehearsal and the real ceremony. Though we don’t practice our pronunciation as much as we did the last two weeks, we do a lot of presenting and group performing. Take today for example. We’re supposed to come up with a new invention, introduce it and market it. We’re having fun discussing the Lion King product, UV Rays Collector Chip, and aren’t paying attention to the time limit. So our team leader and I have to get ourselves on stage and just improvise. I’m crying for help within my heart while the other group members are just standing stiffly behind us. Alas!

I’ve been classified into a group with the best pronunciation and intonation. I’m happy about the feedback which Carolyn gave to me. She said she was surprised by my speaking so well that she requested me to speak more. I got 23 scores out of 30 and full marks in the passage reading in the second oral assessment. Today, I got another feedback of 3^rd oral assessment given by Margret. She said that my EX—pronunciation is not acute enough, having too much nasal sounds and I have to speak with my mouth bigger and wider. She scores me 26.5 out of 30. There’re still two more weeks to go and I’m afraid that I haven’t leave much room for myself to make progresses for.

I got a little sloppy on keeping my blogs.(and my shape as well :p )

Let’s wrap it up.

   I’ve got a little bored with the course, though it’s not like that Phonetics is easy. In the morning, we have plenty of practice on vowels and consonants, trying to pronounce words listed in “the Bible” correctly and hopefully with an accent like native speakers. We do practice the whole morning; however, I doubt it that it can do any good just repeating them over and over again.

      In the afternoon, we work on the listening part and have two comprehension tests. Yet the instructor didn’t give us any instruction or any help, except for giving the answers. I think the activities would be barely helpful to listening abilities, maybe to the opportunities to use English.

On the first day, we have a lot of assessments, including vocabulary, reading comprehension, pronunciation, giving a two-minute speech and writing a one-hundred-word story. All of the assessments are not difficult to me, though I may not do well in them. However, I come across a major problem expressing myself to my team-mate under one-for-one situation. During the break, I felt like the Yankees who were just beaten earlier. I found that my biggest weakness is speaking or making a speech in English.

The most exciting thing in this day is the meeting with the beloved third-grade teacher, Huang Bau Ying.

四年四班，我真的很不喜歡教你們這些魔鬼蛇神！

星期三、四的課，只要到星期天晚上就開始煩惱。

上一班的學生走，下一班的學生來，

下課跟學生聊天、解答他們的問題、處理訂正作業、補救教學，

今天最後一節是體育課，上課鐘響，我已經在講桌準備叫學生排隊，

正修匆忙跑進來，跌倒後撞到椅子，之後就痛得倒地，

班上令人頭痛的一個小朋友，上禮拜和別班小朋友打架，這禮拜和五年級小朋友打架。