Dear Reader,

    After our last issue, I got this moving email from one of our
    readers:

    "Hi JacksonFive,

     Congratulations! You're going to have a new baby soon and it
     seems this is your first one, is that right? I totally agree
     with you that it's a wonderful thing to help others. Since last
     October, I started a Basic English Class for my neighbors, who
     are adults, without asking for financial compensation.

     Few of them are college graduated and most of them have learned
     English for at least six years in school long time ago. Most of
     our children are in Junior or Senior high school and the parents
     realized it's very important to improve their own English ability
     since they didn't make much effort on it when they were young.

     We started with 20 students in the very beginning and now we still
     got about 10-12 people in the class. Above all, we are still
     very happy to keep on and on.

     I used to have an American friend living around the town, but he
     was away for home leave for about one year since now. My friend
     helps me a lot whenever I can't find an answer for my students
     about something I am not very familiar with. Of course, I'll do
     my best to find out an answer from the books around and check out
     the dictionary. It makes me learn more and my English certainly
     improves somehow.

     Basically, I appreciate my students who give me a great chance to
     practice my oral English once a week (2 hours each time). Besides
     some Travel English Conversion and Basic English Grammar study,
     we learned lots of English songs and they told me that's the first
     time for most of them to sing songs in English, can you believe
     it? Of course, they do enjoy it. By the way, I'm going to let
     them act in a play, like "Cinderella" or "Snow White" because some
     students in the class are still very shy and they are reluctant to
     say anything out in English although I tried very hard to encourage
     them. Then I thought it might be a good idea to let him or her
     play a role of a story. However, I'm still trying to make it
     come true. I don't know if I'll make it, but I'll try. In case you
     have any better idea to help me manage the class better, please
     feel free to let me know sometime when you are free.

                                                 Have a nice day!

                                                 Best regards,
                                                 Grace Chen
                                                 in Hengchun"

    Did you enjoy reading this article? Are you, anyone you know, or
    read about doing anything like this? I think if we had more
    positive stories like this in the news, we would create a much
    better world. Don't you think so? Why are there so much negative
    news in our media?

    I promise to keep our Path2English website positive, enriching,
    and fresh. A good example of this would be our "English Share",
    http://www.path2english.com/Share/Share.htm

                                          "Don't complain, do something about it!"
                                            JacksonFive

THIS ISSUES's FEATURED TOPIC:

    "Seeing is believing!"

  I spend the last couple weeks creating video clips of our students.
  Yesterday, we had a very successful "Open House" at the school.
  Together, children and parents laughed and smiled to 40 minutes of
  video clips representing their last 4 months here.

  I really had a good time putting it together because our students
  looked so HAPPY learning English. I feel very close to these
  students. Each one of their smiles makes all my hard work and effort
  worthwhile, http://www.jacksonfive.com.tw/Students/Seeing.htm
  (This is my first video streaming attempt. Please give me some
  advice on it.)

  From close to no English 10 months ago, they have gone to totally
  understanding everything their foreign teacher says and being able to
  express themselves using English. They even use English sentences
  which surprise us. This is because the English we taught has really
  become a part of their world. They are using it like a mother
  tongue. They are making up new sentence patterns now, and using
  English spontaneously without prompting. Wow!

  In no way should this be taken as an advertisement for our school.
  I'm just very happy because of the emotional rewards that my children
  ("students") and our readers have given me. I can't help but
  share my happiness with people near me. Inversely, I also talk about
  our virtual JacksonFive Family a lot with my other "family" at the
  school ^_^ I hope I'm not boring them either ^_^

NEXT ISSUES's FEATURED TOPIC:

    "Purpose of Education"