To clarify the last post-four judges-three of us teaching in the College of Foreign Studies. The fourth judge was a grad student who teaches pt at New Oriental. He had sat in on some of my classes back in September. This was my first meeting with these teachers altho I've been here almost 2 yrs. A communication issue among other things. So we were asked to give each student a score between 1-10 in the areas of pronunciation, fluency, performance, content. They only spoke for about 2 mn-so not too much time for scoring. And each judge was asked to give" suggestions for improvement". Lots of ad-libbing by me while the students just memorize, memorize, memorize.
New Oriental language school has a reputation that is maybe"iffy". If you only learn the material to get a high score but not for the long term-what's the point? And the very high fees that the parents pay. In the blog-"One man bandwidth" Lonnie says much more about test prep, the selling of recommendations...
Tomorrow,I will be co-teaching a video class for MA students. They watch a 25 minute video and make comments or ask questions regarding what happened. Tomorrow, there will be some time spent talking about theslang/idioms used. Possibly, other students will answer their fellow classmates questions rather than me. 61 students does not make for easy discussion. My co-teacher is a professor in the dept-a great guy of many talents.
More later.