Brian Forsyth:
CLASS OF 1981
Belcourt High SchoolClass of 1981
Ottawa, ON
University of Ottawa - EducationClass of 1972
Ottawa, ON
Glengarry District High SchoolClass of 1971
Alexandria, ON
Hawkesbury High SchoolClass of 1967
Hawkesbury, ON
North Toronto Collegiate InstituteClass of 1962
Toronto, ON
Brian's Story
August 12, 2012.
I no longer avail myself of the privileges of this site. If you wish to contact me - and I'd be thrilled if you did - knock on Mr Zuckerberg's door. I'm usually in his house.
Summer vacation now and back to school in less than a month... I went to Seoul for two weeks and visited friends there - after teaching there for eleven years I have a lot of friends there and it was an exhausting two weeks. Otherwise a quiet summer- unlike 2011 when I went to Paris for a week and then spent four weeks in Tunisia following the revolution.
May 7, 2009.
I have now signed a contract for September 2009 to teach at Chia Yang Senior High School in Taiwan. This is a private high school of 350 Taiwanese students preparing for university in either North America or Europe and I'll be one of their 7 Canadian and American teachers - we're doing all of this in a North American style... something quite different and exciting for students in Asia!
Our French department is 100% Canadian and our English department is a mixture of Canadians and Americans. I'll be teaching Senior English, two classes of Basic French and be in charge of preparation for the Internet Based TOEFL testing.
I flew down from Korea to Taiwan to look at the school, talk to the teachers and observe classes. The class sizes are 8-10 and the kids really participate in class. I walked around the campus and the kids all came over to say hello to me - looks like a pretty good place!
Another wonderful high school... to go along with Hawkesbury, Glengarry, Belcourt and HAFS (in South Korea)!
I've been teaching in Korea for 11 years now. I'm too old to do it in Canada, it seems.
Schools have changed a lot. I have my video camera running in class much of the time, taping my students as they perform their oral presentations (oh, Korean high schoolers hate these just as much as all students do!), their debati...Expand for more
ng and drama, so the camera runs a lot. And when they complete an exercise, they can find their grade on the internet that same night.
I don't stand at the front of the classroom anymore. I sit at the back of the room at a table with the students and the class is opened, run and closed by a student chairperson - I butt in only when necessary to assist. My real work is setting up the situation which is going to occur in the class. So the classroom is easy for me and the students get the maximum practice possible.
Some of the other teachers are beginning to do this, but most are still afraid to do this. I just wish I'd known how to do this when I was teaching at Belcourt!
We've constructed an oratorically based English Conversation curriculum, designed to improve students' skills in speaking and listening - and we're the only high school in Korea with such an English curriculum... it's a start.
In July, 2008 I took students to Bulgaria to participate in the International Debate Education Association tournament for debating in English (high school) - 34 countries, I think... and Koreans had won the previous two tournaments. They didn't win this one but the final was between Korea and the United Kingdom. I didn't take the kids there to win - just to learn.
Living and working in Asia is really convenient. There are affordable air tickets to all sorts of tropical paradises in the winter: Bali, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, etc. No need to suffer through Ottawa winters...
And for the first time, I'm with students such as I knew at Belcourt. There I met the students who impressed me for life - and here I have met a young Korean girl who similarly impresses me - a girl of 16 who has never lived outside Korea but aspires to be an English novelist - and maybe she can do it! She's that good - you'd have loved to have had her as a classmate at Belcourt.
Register for Free to view all details!
Reunions
Photos
Register for Free to view all photos!