Journal 4
July 14, 2007


The slow Learner

To be honest, I got lost in the library when I wanted to leave to take the shuttle bus home. It was the first time that I didn’t go out with my classmates. In the past few days, I did pay attention to the direction and memorized the campus map, so I knew exactly how to get to my dormitory safely. I’m not familiar with the library for the lack of practice. I just couldn’t find the door to get out the narrow hallways in the library and tried different doors to get away from the piles of books. Maybe I’m a slow learner just like some of my students.

Ginny asked us to design one beginning-level and one intermediate-level task for different learners. It is easy for teachers to provide difficult tasks for students. However, it’s not easy to design an easy one for slow learners. In my class, some students are slow learners. They choose to ignore the difficulty learning tasks. If they feel frustrated all the time, they give up learning English quickly. It’s the teacher’s duty to give them an appropriate task and make specific instructions for the students to understand clearly what they have to do.

In the morning class, I did not quite follow what Ginny asked us to do, so I couldn’t smoothly join the discussion with classmates. At that time, I felt anxious and desperately needed someone to help me. Until then, I realized what kind of situation my slow-learner students dealt with.