TCEFNC

Your Door To The Future

Team 1

From Winston 李易同:

First of all, I would like to thank the organizers of this activity, you let me pick up the feeling of English again. Since I came back from America
more than ten months ago, I have very little chance to speak English. I am very unfamiliar with English. But this time, you not only give me a
good opportunity, a good platform, but also let me make friends with different styles. Let me not only go further in language, but also in habits
and ideas of life.
Secondly, I would like to thank my friends for showing me that its not hard to work hard. When I think of my first meeting, I didn't have any preparation at all. I wanted to see what kind of meeting it was with the attitude of beating soy sauce. But when it's your turn to introduce your hobbies, you take out your own PPT and speak in a reasonable way. I have a feeling in a moment that you are so powerful, and I want to be so active and hard-working.
Finally, I want to thank Yaoyao's mother. In the first few meetings, we were not very active, but you pulled us together in a friendly way. In fact, its not difficult to get out of the original small circle, just take a step forward fearlessly and succeed.

Team 3

From Angela Wang:

This was a great experience and I’m glad I participated in this. I learned some Chinese phrases through translating and I also learned other ways to teach for certain people. If I were to do this again, I would start off at a slower pace rather than rushing through reading the articles. I hope that next time the resources could be more engaging and fun. Overall, this was a good experience for me.

Team 4

From Henry Yu 俞九仁:

I had a lot of fun teaching english to the foreign students from Wuhan. I learned a lot about communication and teaching. Most importantly I was able to help these students with english while they couldn’t go to school. During the classes me and the other host read short stories and answered the questions with the students. Overall this opportunity was very fun and I got to help some students with english.

From Daniel Wang:

When we first started, we were a little shy, and did things slowly. However, as we talked more, we became more familiar with each other. We felt more comfortable and were able to freely talk with each other. We helped each other analyze passages and improve speaking skills. We also taught the students from China some casual English phrases, which were not a part of the passages. We also discussed our interests and out-of-school activities. I learned how to teach better, and some new Chinese phrases as well. I learned a lot from this experience.

Taught many things: patience, time management, not to be lazy. 

Was pretty fun. Learned things about china

How we did meetings

Scheduling  meetings. Managing meetings. Sending emails. Kicking people. Patience from time lag and people coming late.

Time management from sending emails and preparing for classes

Not to be lazy by forcing me to send emails and project status reports

Free talk. China popular games (pubg csgo overwatch) Similar To the US

Intro: Introduce support china

Taught many things:

Para 1: Meeting times, Scheduling meetings, Sending emails, Managing

Para 2: Patience, Time management, Laziness,  leading

Para 3: Articles, Free talk, Games

Conclusion:

Enjoyed it

Learned many things

A little sad that it is ending

Because of the coronavirus, many schools were shut down. Especially in China, where it all started. Because of the many students who were not getting much education, my mother and many other parents decided to have their children teach chinese students english. The support china program has taught me many things, and I had fun doing it.

As the leader of team 6, I had to do many things such as scheduling meetings and sending emails. We had meetings every Friday at 8-9 PM eastern time, and I would send an email to all the participants. After each meeting, I also had to send a meeting summary to the project manager, who would then update the project status of our group. Sometimes, random people would join our meeting and try to disrupt it by saying things such as “Big Noodle” in a weird accent. They were all immediately kicked afterwards.

The support china program has taught me many things. Patience from waiting for people to join and times when no one joined, combating laziness by forcing myself to send an email even when I don’t feel like it, and most importantly, leadership by making me manage a group of people and lead meetings.

During meetings, we would go over and have the China team read an article. Then we would correct their pronunciation and explain/google translate words that they don’t know or understand. We would also answer any questions that they have about the article. During the last meeting, we had a free talk, and ended up talking about video games. I learned that many of the popular games in China(Ex: Pubg, cs:go, and Overwatch) were also popular in the US. 

Overall, I enjoyed the support china program. I’ve learned many things from it such as patience and leadership. I have had a good time in general and am a bit sad that the program is finally ending. These two months passed by in a flash and I hope that I can get out of quarantine soon.

Team 7:

From Jonathan Zhao

This week concludes the Support China English Study Groups project. As the team manager of 5 teams and a member of team 7, I have experienced the impact of this huge project on a much larger scale than most of my peers. Although there were a few shortcomings, I believe that this event was a big success, for both the US groups and the China groups.

My group is made up of 4 members. Jocelyn and I are from the US, while Iris and James are from China. On our first meeting, we were all strangers to each other, and there was little conversation. Now, we are much more open to each other, working and laughing together. Each meeting, we have the Chinese team read through a passage of their choosing paragraph by paragraph. After each paragraph, the American team goes through any mispronunciations or unknown words. This strategy helps eliminate any mistakes from repeating because they learn in smaller portions. After going through the passage, we moved on to the questions using the same style of strategy.

Although most meetings went smoothly, we did have occasional technical difficulties. The China team would sometimes have connection problems, causing their video feed to black out and audio to stop. However, these technical difficulties only slightly impacted our activities, and were annoying at most.

 I was surprised at how diligent the China team was, as they were always really focused and ready to learn. Not only did they try their best to read the passage and answer the questions, they also listened carefully when the US team explained any mistakes. Overall, I feel that the China team improved in their vocabulary and pronunciation, but they could still work on their fluency. Although they were able to read the sentences without much of a problem, there was still some hesitation and random pauses in between words.

All in all, I really enjoyed my time participating in the study group. It was nice to be able to help others in a subject that I was rather confident in. I’m sure that my group members also find that these meetings were very helpful. 

From James 侯文璟:

Although this online communication happens once a week it  make me rapid and brilliant progress.
     This is the first time I have a talk with local American people specifically.Before this my English teachers are all Chinese, so I feel lucky to have this chance to learn authentic English by this activity. During this two months,I think I not only learn about English words, grammar and speaking,  but also learn about English culture that I didn’t know before such as some interested pronouns and excited school life.Our view is wider than before.What’s more, it built a friendly relationship between students in this two country.This activity will become a unforgettable experience and memory in my student life.
       Today it’s the most difficult time fighting with the COVID-19. It’s very lucky that we met each other.A Chinese saying goes ：the bright moon shines over the sea; from far away we share this moment together. In this special time, I want to say “Thank you” to every people I met in the past two month. It’s a treasure in my life

Team 8

From 张宏瑜:

在这短短的十次课里 ，我学到了很多东西，例如许多以前从来不认得的单词，以及欧美国家的一些文化，又或者是结交了三四个新朋友，都让我很愉快和难忘。并且在学的这些课文中了解到了美国青少年平时都干些什么，做些什么，使我扩宽了眼界，增长了知识。虽然我以前去过法国当交换生，感受过欧美文化，但这次活动给我的感觉和那次有很多差异。比如这次活动了解外国文化了解得更广泛，这次活动可以足不出户地学习，真正实现了“线上游学”。我很庆幸自己参加了这个活动！

In this short period of ten classes, I learned a lot of things, such as many words I had never known before, as well as some cultures of European and American countries, or made three or four new friends, which made me very happy and unforgettable. In addition, I learned about what American teenagers do and do in daily life from these texts, which broadened my horizon and increased my knowledge. Although I have been to France as an exchange student before and experienced the European and American cultures, there are many differences between this activity and that one. For example, this activity helps us to know more about foreign cultures. We can study at home in this activity, which truly realizes the “online study tour”. I’m glad I took part in this activity!

From James Xiao

I want to thank the leaders and administrators for being able to provide this excellent opportunity for us to be able to do this program. This has been an amazing and great time being able to teach others and get to learn from them to. From this program I was able to learn how to teach and what it is like to prepare and share lessons with others. During these weeks, our progress was significant because by lesson 8, they had learned much more and knew more than from the beginning. From both us and the Wuhan students we had learned a lot about each other’s cultures and about the country. We had developed this friendship that I don’t want to leave since it has been quite some time together. I also learned with this program that with this astronomical task comes the importance of leadership and responsibility. We have to be responsible to teach and be there for each other when questions or things are needed. As with leadership, we also have to teach one another and be able to lead and respect everyone. I hope that we are able that we all stay safe during this time and to be able to do something like this again in the future.

From Brian Zhang:

I am thankful of the Triangle Creative Education Foundation for providing us a precious opportunity to teaching the Chinese students about English during the COVID-19 lockdown We learned that they have awesome comprehensive skills, we only need to teach them about the pronunciations in the most cases. We also learned that the preparation of each class is crucial for the quality of the class. I enjoyed this unique experience of teaching them after all.

Team 9

Team 12:

From: Haitian Huang (黄海天)

The Teaching in China program was a very interesting experience, as I believe every member of group 12 learned something from each other over the course of these 8 weeks. In chronological order by week, the curriculum that was taught is as follows: Get To Know Each Other,
School Life, Animals, Cooking, Sports, Biography, Natural Sciences, and Gardening. During each week, we refined our teaching methods by improving break time, amount of information taught, and the way the information was presented. Because of this constant improvement, I believe that we all began to learn more and more from each other every week. I am confident that not only did we all learn English and Chinese, but we also learned the information being presented in the above topics as well as how to interact with people from a different background. Overall, I think that this was an amazing experience that I would do again, not only for the information that can be learned but also for the friends that can be made.

From Aida Guo:

I had a wonderful time communicating with the members on Team 12 throughout this project. We went through these lessons: School Life, Animals, Cooking, Sports, Biography, Natural Sciences, and used the topics as guides for each of our lessons. During the meetings, members presented their own pictures, slideshows, and stories; we held friendly conversations; read through certain texts; watched different videos (including part of “One World Together at Home”); and even toured part of the Natural Science museum. I am very thankful to this program and everyone on the team, it was such a great experience and I’m glad to have met great people along the way!

Team 13:

From Leran Fu :

Through this special experience, I have learned how to teach better. This helped me to learn to encourage more and to give advice on pronunciation. I was also taught to be understanding and diligent. I was glad to be a part of this and to help teach English to others.

 

Team 14:

From Danielle Li:

I am really happy that I was able to interact with friends from Wuhan. Every week, we would read through the passages, define difficult words, clarify the pronunciation, and discuss related topics. After that, we would answer the questions together as a team. Many of us took notes during the meeting to avoid making similar mistakes in the future. By the end of the eighth week, our team has improved a lot in reading passages fluently and sharing our thoughts. When we had spare time, we talked about our hobbies and school life to learn more about each other. In order to get together every week, we adjusted our schedules even if someone was on the road or had to rush over from another meeting. I have really enjoyed this experience because we were able to spend time with friends who are halfway across the world to learn and laugh together.

From ZiMo You:

It has been two months since we first met online. We’ve become friends and shared a lot of fun experiences together. I would like to thank Danielle and Alan for their help. During our learning sessions, my English has improved a lot. Please stay safe during the pandemic of COVID-19. I hope we can meet in person in the future.

Team 15

From Zhuoying Liang:

It was a pleasure to be part of this English Teaching Program. I really appreciate the opportunity to teach and learn from the kids at Wuhan during the time of this pandemic. Our group did have some technical issues and one of our Wuhan members was not able to join most of our sessions. What I learned from this experience was that the Wuhan students have strong reading and pronunciation skills. They were a little shy and nervous to speak and ask questions but it helped with a lot of encouragement from the US members. An obstacle we encountered was both the US members struggled with Chinese fluency so sometimes the Wuhan kids might’ve not fully understood the meanings despite our explanations. This program gave me an opportunity to improve my Chinese translation, teaching, and organization skills. I learned new things about Wuhan that didn’t know before like their daily lives, social media, weather, etc. A small problem we encountered during the sessions was the scheduling issues. It may be the time zone differences but sometimes Wuhan students would not join the call and we would have to host it again another time. With that said, we did have some preparation for our lessons but could’ve done more to make the lessons flow better. Also, I enjoyed reading the project statuses of the other teams on TCEF website because the other teams gave me more ideas on how to teach the Wuhan students. Overall, it was a wonderful experience and I would love to be able to teach again in the future!

Team 18:

Team 19 

From Allen Xu: 

Overall, my experience teaching Rainer and Richard about English was a pleasurable one. They
were very focused on understanding the reading passage, yet they were mature enough to participate in
our discussions about the article and the ones about our lives. They had some pronunciation issues
during the first few weeks, but after a few sessions, they were able to pronounce almost all of the words
correctly. Their ELA comprehension has significantly improved. During the first few classes, they had
trouble telling us the main idea of some paragraphs, but the last few sessions they knew a lot more
about what the main idea of the passage was. Another significant improvement they have developed
was that their vocabulary has be expanded tenfold. Before, they didn’t know 25% of the words in the
article, but after a while, that percentage has been shrunken to virtually nothing. So overall, this
experience is very soothing and I would love to do this again.

From James Liu:

We would start off each meeting with a simple greeting. Then we will
ask one person to read the first paragraph to work on pronunciation. Then
we will ask that person what the main idea was to work on reading
comprehension. We will then ask them the meanings of some difficult
words to help them build their vocabulary. We would then ask if they had
any questions or comments. They would do this for the whole passage
alternating people. After we are done with the whole passage, we would
ask them the main idea of the whole passage. After that we would talk
about things related to the passage. Then we would talk to them about their
lives and school. The conversation works on their pronunciation and our
pronunciation helps guide them.
Out of this, they learned pronunciation, vocabulary, and reading
comprehension. This experience helped me be more responsible because I
had to act like a teacher. I also learned about people in other places of the
world and their daily lives.

from 成望宇:

Study Achievement Report
During eight-week study with partners，I have learnt eight passages about different topics and Allen,James,Richard and I know each other better and better.Of course,I achieved a lot. First,through the pssages,I learn of many things that I have not heard of before.These things make me know this world better.For example,I learnt about The Eighth Wonder of the World last week and I just know ,like”Oh!There is a huge structures was built 70 years ago.That is amazing!”Certainly,if I go to America one day,I won’t miss it. Secondly,this activity makes the other and I became friends.After learning the paasages, our group always have communications about our daily lives,travel experiences or something else.And at the end of tonight’s lesson,we exchanged our Wechat ID.I believe we will keep in touch for a long time even forever. All in all,these eight lessons will become a part of my life.I will treasure these time forever.

Team 21

From: Ashley Wang

Since Day 1, all of our group members have been able to challenge ourselves as far as communicating and expressing our ideas in a second language. Every Sunday, our zoom session started at 9:00 and would last approximately 1 hour. During that period, each member from China would take turns reading a chosen article, which we would then go over to analyze and explain any unfamiliar words. During the first couple of weeks, one of our members did not participate, however, both greatly improved their English skills as far is communicating, reading, and so forth.

During the first meeting, we introduced ourselves and choose to begin reading a level 5 article and answering the questions attached to the file. It started off a bit rocky and none of us was familiar with the format of using Zoom to communicate with others from around the globe, but we quickly got the hand of it. The following meeting was a reflection of the first, except with a different article. We asked them to read “Plenty of Pancakes” and went over every individual word that they were unfamiliar with or struggled to pronounce. The paper taught us the exact instruction to make a pancake and incorporated the necessary ingredients and some tips for the readers. The next week, our group choose to advance to a level 6 article entitles “A Garden in the Clouds”, which emphasized the importance of trees in our community, and we then continued to explain the story and answer the questions. We choose a similar article during the third week under the same theme and answered the questions after reading over the story “What’s cooking”. Each team member from china took turns reading every paragraph and explain each individual term.

The next week, we started off reading a new article “It’s a Birds’ Life”, as usual, which narrated the discoveries made by Charles Darwin during his time on the Gilopocos islands and uncovered the importance of his finding on society from then to now. The following Sunday, we discussed the current events, such as the coronavirus and activities we have been up to during quarantine. We then choose an article under the “Money” category and began to read and understand the information. After reading “Money Matter”, we developed a gradual understanding of the value of money and its history as well as answer the question provided afterwords. During the last meeting, we compared schools in China versus schools in the U.S. and discussed the current events. Overall, each one of our group members definitely gained something from this experience and walked away with something new.

Team 22

From 樊铮:

 As the activity ends , I wanna share some of my feelings . Besides learning the articles, every time we chat , they may ask “What’s your favorite book?” Actually, I haven’t read much, so it’s a embarrassing topic for me. But it also reminds me of my shortcoming. Reading is a part of their life. When they happy, they read. When they confused, they read. When they boring , they read…… But what about me? I surf the Internet as soon as I have time. I was stupid and I must try to read more.   Another hot topic is dream. When they talk about their dreams, I can tell hope fills their eyes .And they are ready to make their dreams come true and have plans. I have no dream! I’m not talented. So what can I do and what will I be? It’s a question to regard seriously.

Team 24

From Samuel Shi :

While teaching the students from Wuhan English, I learned that teaching something so common and easy to you, to others is not as easy as it seems. Often times you have to prepare many things, but this time it was easy for us because all of the material was already prepared, but we still had to go over the material and find answers to the questions, set up the meetings, and send out emails and messages to inform the parents about everything, but most of all, I found it the hardest to motivate the students to want to learn or participate in the learning. They sometimes did not have their assigned homework ready, or sometimes they would not want to talk and participate in class. I can understand why they don’t really want to participate because the classes were not that much fun, but in the end, I think it helped their English quite a bit.

From Ethan He:

In my opinion, I think the Help China program was a great way to help the kids in Wuhan who want to learn and get better with English. There were so many volunteers and so many Wuhan children that were eager to be in this program. Here are some major pros and cons that came with this process.

Us American students being able to help the Wuhan students who weren’t as good in English really benefited both sides. We got some experience with teaching, setting up classes, and speaking, while the Wuhan students got better at speaking, reading, and understanding English. I appreciate the fact that we were actually all very close in age. This helped us relate and get to know each other better.

Some cons of these classes are that sometimes we had technical difficulties to get through and sometimes the students were shy. Also, with zoom changing their settings a lot, it sometimes was hard to have everyone join in the same meeting. Also, in the beginning of this program, the documents were scrambled all over the place. Each topic was not where it was supposed to be. The majority of this was fixed later on, but the sports and sea life section were both missing and my group of students really loved sports. 

Overall, this experience was very fun. In the end, we made a few more friends and boosted our skills in many different areas. Many kids got to do some volunteering for the first time and many enjoyed it. I hope tcef does something like this again in the future to help other students in need as well. 

Team 26:

From Ronald Zheng:

So I am writing an essay about my experiences teaching English to Chinese kids.

It was a good experience teaching them English, as I meet new people. They were pretty friendly. But I didn’t really know them.

In the eight weeks, we spent on this project I feel like it was an experience. If I could improve anything that I did over these weeks, it is probably now well I knew them. If I knew them better I could have helped them more, but it is over, so this is what I have now.

Team 27:

Raymond Yang:

All in all, the Help China Program was a really enjoyable and fun learning experience. We had many things to learn about each other, and we all had a fun time. Everyone was communicating the best they could, despite the distance apart. We all did very good in the meeting, as everyone was very interactive and we all understood each other, resulting in a learning experience far greater than just English tutoring. This learning experience in which we teach others is very important in my opinion, as it teaches you fast paced chinese translation, online learning experiences as well as how to teach. Also, this learning experience is very good for the people we are teaching at Wuhan, as they are trying to learn English in this time of need. I think that given the right circumstances, they would probably learn even more english from us online than in their regular school. As team captain for my team, I also have learned many experiences, including many technology gimmicks.

Angela Yang:

This was a very fun and interesting learning experience, and I made three new friends. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I could improve and learn upon my Chinese while also teaching others about English. It was a bit difficult to communicate and coordinate convenient times for everyone in the beginning, but in the end, we could do things smoothly and talk about the passages and learn more about each other.

From 夏日苔丝:

Team 29

From Kevin Fu:

Team 30:

 

From Tom Sun:

It is a great honor for me to be there teaching such an astonishing language to people who wanted to learn. I’d like to give my thanks to my team leader, Shelly, and the learner from Wuhan. It has been only a few weeks and I can already sense the fact that China is a proud country with magnificent people and is filled with a strong sense of nationalism. I’d like to learn more about Kids from Wuhan. They really do know a lot of English and they are very smart indeed. Now I understand what President Richard Milhous Nixon felt when he said, “As you said in your toast, the Chinese people are a great people; the American people are a great people… We have great differences today. What brings us together is that we have common interests that transcend those differences.” In class, we learn from each other, although we have different senses of logic, knowledge, and opinion. In this talk today, I am going to talk about our differences and our common interests. I am going to talk about differences first. As you know, different countries teach their citizens different beliefs, so we, Chinese Americans, will surely have different views in politics and many other things. I am sure that I see more than the learner from Wuhan, and I don’t think that naming examples will be necessary. The learner from Wuhan was definitely smarter and knew more than me for that not she is more experienced, but for that she works very hard in what she is doing. An example can be that she will always search up English words that she doesn't know before I even tell her what it means. We all have different aspects of history because she read off history textbooks, but I read from all versions of books and explore my own ideas. A wise person once told me: “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” Everyone should read different books and form their own opinions, so if you are reading what everyone else is reading, then you won’t know how to think and expand your creativity. If you want to know the world, you must read the ancient and modern books. No offense, but history textbooks are only a version of what a person thinks, we should look at things with different perspectives: just like the sun is diminutive when we are far away, but larger when we are closer. We all do different things but what delivers us all together is that we all want to learn from each other. Yes, that’s our common interest, we all want to learn, even if we live a different life, and we have a different environment. Learning is how we improve as human beings and by sending that knowledge to other people, we learn more.
Learning is giving.
Giving is Appreciating.
Appreciating is gathering.
Gathering is evolving.
Evolving is learning.

I may ought to stop here, and just leave the entire script where it is, but what our common interest is to not to be disregarded. We all know good will prevail over evil, we all know world peace is a vital thing, we all know how to tolerate each other, and there are more: we know to be respectful and we know that learning from each other is the biggest thing that made us different from wild beasts. I would like to leave with a positive note here, with frankness, I think that this class advanced my learning of other cultures and increased my knowledge. Our difference is what makes us unique and our common interest is what brings us together.
Thank you and may God bless you all.

Team 33:

From Benny Yang:

Teaching people my age from Wuhan how to speak English has been an entertaining and enlightening experience for me, and I hope to be able to do it again someday (under different circumstances of course). I learned that school in China is significantly more rigorous than that of American school programs, and I also realized how much China emphasizes the learning of English, different from the more lax approach of learning a foreign language in America. However, on a social and generational level, I found much in common with the people that I interacted with, and we shared a lot of similar ideals. All in all, this experience has been incredibly enjoyable and I’m glad I participated in helping these people in learning how to speak in English.

From: Cathy Yang

Hello! I was the group leader of team 33, and I believe we all learned a lot about each of our peers and about the differences in cultures in our scheduled meetings. At this time, the Chinese students seemed to still be very busy with schoolwork and classes online, but they were still very receptive and eager to learn English. We all learned about the difference in school years between China and the United States; In China, high school is comprised of 10th-12th grade, whereas in the United States it is comprised of 9th-12th grade. All in all, everyone was able to learn a variety of information in our meetings together, even though there were only eight sessions.

 

It was a nice time to talk with people out of the country. First it was them on lockdown while we were at school, and now it is vice versa. It was a good experience to just chat with strangers and be a teacher for once. I admit I played a very minor role during meetings, but that’s how I like it, being the spectator and watching what happens. We talked about articles and discussed confusing words or phrases, and answered the questions at the end. The Wuhan chat was an entertaining but informing meeting that taught me a lot.

From Wang Li Ping:

Eight weeks’ on-line English study makes great progress for me,many thanks to the teachers who organized the activity. Speaking in English with teammates from US. is not very easy for me, but it can improve my spoken English.and I learn many new words, and learn science,history and geography knowledge from the English articles. now 8-week-study ends, the teammates and I become good friends on-line.

I think the English study activity  is very meaningful.  

From Daniel Paechtner (The leader of T38):

I like the volunteer activities very much.Thank you for offering so nice activities !

I started volunteer activities on  March 14. As the team leader, I prepared lessons every week, and also I have to deal with some tech problems. I Helped Huang to solve Zoom’s problem in class, but his zoom always has problems in connection, so I used zoom and WeChat to teach him. I found that students are suitable for level 4 courses, level 5 is too hard for him, so according to the characteristics of him, I tried my best to teach him with the patient and answer questions in detail, and submit a summary after each class. Overall, I think I did a good job, I don’t think Chinese students have an English language environment and it’s not easy to learn English. I’m willing to do my best to help them.

 

Thank you!

 

 

 

 

感谢 Daniel在万忙之中抽出时间给我上课,虽然只有短短的八节课,但是对我的帮助很大,使我的英语水平提高了不少,我十分感谢 Daniel对我的悉心教导,我不会的单词,语法都会一一讲解说明,对我不懂的都会给我讲解,说明,无微不至,感谢 Daniel,也感谢这个平台,给了我们认识交流的机会。谢谢老师！