THEME: Teaching Materials

I really needed textbooks from my Level Four and Level Five class because we just, we didn’t have textbooks for that. But the school, you know, didn’t have money or they said no. But then this year, the Spanish Department gets all brand-new textbooks. Umm…so sometimes I feel like we have a very small program. Next year I will be the only Chinese, I won’t have any other Chinese colleagues, but sometimes when you are in a small program, you feel like you get overlooked for resources, umm…particularly textbooks. The textbooks are so bad for high school Chinese. It is ridiculous that there’s no really good textbooks and I have talked a lot with teacher friends, we all agree that. The textbooks are pretty bad and for Spanish, they have so many options and so many like great textbooks, and materials and resources. For Chinese, it’s so hard to find that, and then (… …) I just made my own materials. And there’s not much online even on websites, like teachers pay teachers, you know. For English or Spanish, any other subjects, if you really need a lesson plan or if you need materials, you can usually buy them or find them. For Chinese, you have to make everything yourself. And that’s kind of a huge problem. (… …) but also my Chinese friends are reluctant to share their materials with random people. I wanna, I’ve wanted to make a database online for a long time. This has been my dream to make an online Chinese teacher database. But people, and we can just put our stuff for free just to help the new teachers or help other teachers, but people are really reluctant to do that. (Bridget, Interview)

REFLECTION QUESTION:
你知道有什么对你备课很有帮助的在线中文教师资料库吗？如果要建立这样一个资料库，你最希望这个资料库里包含哪些内容呢？