2012 Expectations of Kaplan students

Some comments about the students in China.

When I first took classes at Kaplan I was surprised at the students not having a notebook in which to write notes on my subject and to do any homework. I have taught in Australia, Thailand, South Korea and Nigeria and without exception students have a notebook.

Consequently I looked to see what they intended doing with respect to the content for my lessons and it became obvious that they expected to write notes in their textbook. That was no problem. I have always related the content of my course to the textbook the students have so they can refer to it in their own time. Sometimes with students poorer at English we will read the text in class but generally I leave it up to the students to read themselves. It subsequently surprised me to be told by some teachers that they did not refer to the textbook at all and did not regard it as an aid to student learning. It means they were giving the students notes to write in English and disregarding the help offered by the textbook. If I was running things these teachers would be made to change their teaching methods. The English ability of the students here varies from good to bad and they all need the help provided by a textbook. In Physics I got the school to supply the students with a more readable textbook in addition to the one they had when I got here. One that was more a summary of the course, or a set of notes in effect. Any text should be checked out for its reading age and for the students here it should be quite low.

The first lot of homework I gave the students was a disappointment in two regards.

The first was that not having a notebook meant that the homework from some students was quite literally written on a scrap of paper. While there could be an excuse for this it was not acceptable to me but I was further surprised six months later to see homework being handed in to other teachers on similar scraps of paper.

The second was that of the twenty plus students five or so had actually done the homework. The remainder had copied it. In copying they had copied everything. It was so obvious that it was clear they expected it to be what was expected. I made it clear that copying made the exercise a waste of time for me to collect it as they were not getting the practice they needed. I possibly tried three times to get their cooperation in not copying before I gave up any ideas of marking homework from them.

Their textbook has answers to the questions and they are expected to check that they have the correct answer. If they don’t they are meant to do something about it.

We have weekly tests that are meant to indicate to the students how they are progressing and encourage them to study. With some it has not had that effect.

Maxwell Partington

2012/05/06