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The ABTA has several ways to communicate with your Bridge
colleagues;
these services are available to current ABTA members:
Chat online at BBO on the fourth
Sunday at 8:30PM EDT
ABTA Yahoo Discussion Group |
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BBO Chat Online...
(Fourth Sunday at 8:30PM EDT) |
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Date |
Topic |
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2009 Schedule |
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| December |
Holidays time - no session this month. |
| November |
How long are your courses, and your lessons? Are you now running shorter
courses, as many of us are? Or do you run drop in lessons? What works best
for you and your students? Come and discuss options you may not have thought
of with other teachers. |
| October |
As an adjunct to your lessons, do you suggest that your students purchase
software from you or elsewhere to augment their learning? If so, which
programs do you recommend and how well are they working for your students?
Come and discuss software options for your students. |
| September |
Back to fall classes.....what are you doing differently this year? Have you
revised your classes in the light of new ideas you've learned or from
mistakes you've made? Come and discuss your new course outline with others. |
| August |
Did you take the summer off, or did you run some different bridge courses?
Seminars? Weekends away? Grandparent and grandchild beginners? Come and tell
us about your interesting summer. |
| July |
No meeting - see you at our ABTA Seminar and Conference! (July 21-24th in
Washington, DC) |
| June 28th |
What new bridge books have you enjoyed this year? Both for yourself and for
your students? You didn't have time to read any? Shame on you.....well, come
and hear about what the rest of us have been reading! |
| May 24th |
Now that you have taken all those new students through their first course or
two, what will you provide for them next? Have you thought about running a
beginner game for them, or getting them to come to an already established
game? |
| April 26th |
How has your fall and winter session gone? Were your classes successful? Is
there anything you wish you had done differently? Will you be changing
anything next year? |
| March 22nd |
As a teacher, do you ever get involved in mentoring programs at your club?
How well do they work? How do you match up mentors and students? Do you give
the mentors any advice? Do you hold mentor/mentee games? Come and tell us
about your successes or disasters! |
| February 22nd |
What on-line resources do you use as a player and as a teacher? Come and
share your favourite web sites and forums. |
| January 25th |
Do you teach or mentor on-line? If so, how well does it
work? How many students do you teach at a time? Come and talk to those who
do or who are thinking about it. |
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2008 Schedule |
| November 23rd |
Are you learning from your mistakes? Are you taking advice from other bridge
teachers? Have your methods and your lesson content changed this year? What
is working better?
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October
26th |
Are your old students still with you? We all know that students need a
succession of courses and play experiences before they become competent
bridge players. How do you structure your courses to accommodate this?
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| September 28th |
Whether you use the ACBL material, Better Bridge courses, Pat Harrington's
beginner lessons, or something else? What do your students do at the end
of your beginner course? Do you entice them to the bridge club? Do you hold
a Learning Game? Or do you send them out into the bridge world all on their
own. Have you thought about what they need next, and have you planned for
it?
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| August 24th |
Now is the time to think about courses for the fall and winter. Are you
changing anything?
Are you adding new courses to your schedule? Are you updating your
material? How do you keep those intermediate students who need so much
review, without teaching the same thing over and over again?
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| July 27th |
How do you decide what your students need next?
Do you listen to their mistakes and blunders? Do you
play with them and find out what they don't know? Do your courses reflect
their needs?
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| June 22nd |
How do you help students when they complain of information overload?
Do you keep things simple for
beginners and then gradually offer them more? Or do you give them everything
at the beginning and then
review, review, review?
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| May 25th |
New books.
What new bridge books have you read this year that have been useful for
your teaching?
How do you share this information with your students?
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| April 27th |
What makes for a successful course? Can you identify which of your
recent courses have been the most successful and why?
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| March 30th |
How do you cope with stress? Teaching can be stressful at times,
with too many classes or not enough hours in the day. How do you stay on top
of things and reduce your stress levels?
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| February 24th |
Difficult students... We all have them from time to time. How do
you deal with them diplomatically and still keep the rest of the class
happy
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| January 27th |
Building your teaching business with a free introductory lesson.
Amy Nellissen will join us to give you some great tips on this topic. If you
missed her at the summer convention be sure to come to this chat!
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2007 Schedule |
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| October 28th |
What do you think of the new ACBL lesson series? Come and chat
about how well they are working with your
students.
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| September 23rd |
Do our beginner students need to learn some basic conventions?
If so, which ones? How and when do you introduce
them?
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| August 26th |
What courses are you planning to run in the fall? Many of our
students seem to need to review the basics forever. How do you keep those
basic review lessons interesting and different, without going on to
complicated conventions?
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| July 29th |
What bridge computer programs do you suggest to your students?
Have you had any feedback about how useful they
are? Do you recommend that your students play online? If so, do you play
with them? How well does it work?
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| June 24th |
Our students' needs.
How do you identify your students' needs and then go about fulfilling
them?
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| May 27th |
Bridge books. What books do you find useful for your students or
yourself?
Have you tried the new ACBL beginner books with your classes? What books
have you read lately to keep up with the latest ideas in bridge playing and
teaching?
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| April 22nd |
The business of teaching.
ABTA master teacher and past president Leslie Schafer, full-time bridge
teacher, will be our guest as we discuss business planning, tax stuff,
keeping accounts, and all those fun things that go along with running your
own business. How do you cope with it, could you do it better?
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| March 25th |
By this time of year fall and winter classes are just about over, how
successful were they for you this year?
What worked well or what would you like to change? Come and discuss with
other teachers your successes and failures.
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| February 25th |
25 million people in the USA know how to play bridge but 20 million of
them have never heard of duplicate.
So that's an awful lot of social bridge players out there. What do you do
as a teacher to attract social players and what do you teach them?
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| January 28th |
For most bridge teachers, beginners are our bread and butter. What
we teach them and how we treat them can make all the difference. How
successful are you with your beginners? What do you teach them? What methods
and materials do you use? How do you keep them coming to classes and turn
them into bridge players? Come and discuss what works for you.
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2006 Schedule |
| December |
NO CHAT IN DECEMBER. Happy Holidays everyone. |
| November 26th |
Are you teaching part-time or full-time?
How many courses can you cope with at a time? Some teachers seem to find
enough students for enough classes to fill all their waking hours. The rest
of us often struggle to fill two or three courses a year. Come and discuss
problems and possible solutions.
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| October 22nd |
How do you pace your courses?
Do your students move smoothly from one set of lessons to another? Or do
you suggest they go out and play before taking the next course? What works
best for your students?
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| September 24th |
Bridge in
your area. How happy are you with what is
happening where you are?
Is your
teaching bringing more new players into the bridge clubs? Do you liase with
other area teachers and clubs to make
bridge more widely available?
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| August 27th |
How do you
deal with difficult students?
Have you developed any particular techniques? Come and share your
experiences.
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| July 23rd |
Effective
course descriptions.
Time to plan
those fall courses. How do you advertise your courses and get the word out
there? Do you run eight-week courses, four weeks? Or just drop in lessons?
Come and
share ideas about great advertising.
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| May 28th |
Keeping up
with new ideas.
It's always a
challenge to stay up-to-date with new ideas in bridge and bridge teaching.
How do you do this? What changes have you made in your teaching since you
began?
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| April 23rd |
Are you a
bridge nanny?
How do you
keep those beginner students playing bridge? A learning game? Supervised
play? Bridge Plus? What works for you and your students? Come and
share your ideas.
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| March 26th |
How do you
reconcile the ACBL text book series teaching?
16-18 NT and
strong twos with today's duplicate world of 15-17 NT and weak twos? Does
this cause problems for you and your students? If so, how do you handle it?
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| Feb. 26th |
Teaching
on cruise ships
Could you do
it? What works... short topics? full lessons? ABTA master teacher and
experienced cruise ship bridge presenter Barb Seagram from Toronto will join
us, come and pick her brains about what works best on board ship.
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| Jan. 22nd |
Where and
how do you find absolute beginners?
What
advertising is the most effective? How do you keep your students going until
they become duplicate/social players? Do you offer them more lessons?
Supervised play? Play courses? Or just send them out into the big world of
bridge? What works best for you and your students?
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2005 Schedule |
| December |
No Chat
in December, happy holidays everyone!
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| November 27th |
Your
students' needs
Do you just
advertise your lessons
and hope students turn up or do you think about your students' needs and run
lessons accordingly? How do you identify your students' needs
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Our monthly on-line Chat sessions are informal, friendly and fun. They
enable us to network with other teachers, comparing notes, ideas,
frustrations and successes. For those who have not yet tried this form of
communication, here’s how it works.
To take part you need to download the Bridge Base program from:
www.bridgebase.com
[If you have any problems with the download please contact Fred Gitelman on
1-888-631-9581, between 8 am. – 5 pm. pacific time, he has graciously
offered to walk you through the download by phone.]
Once you have this program on your computer you can go into the BBO site any
time that you are connected to the internet, by clicking on the icon on your
desktop. You can play bridge on line for free, organize on-line lessons with
students, or playing time with students, or visit the bridge library.
To access a chat room on BBO you simply click on the ‘explore bridge’ button
from the main screen, then click on ‘chat rooms’. Anyone can open a chat
room for bridge purposes. Our ABTA chats are usually scheduled for the
fourth Sunday of the month, at 8.30 pm. EST. For a list of our up coming
Chat topics and dates see the ABTA web site at www.abtahome.com or look in
your latest Quarterly magazine. Of course, we conduct our ‘chat’ by typing
to each other, so if you are a fast typist you do have an advantage. Once
in the chat room you will see only a big empty screen with your name and a
few others listed at the side. To ‘chat’ you simply start typing, a chat
bar will appear with your message in it, and at the end of your sentence you
hit enter to send it to the rest of the room. As people ‘talk’ the screen
fills up and you can scroll back up to read if you missed something. It’s
like reading the script of a play. You can also drag the chat bar up to the
top of the screen so that you can more easily read the new messages
appearing at the bottom. To find out who else is in the chat room with you
just move your cursor over their name at the side and their profile will
appear. It is helpful if those of you who take part fill in your profile
ahead of time so that we know whom we are chatting to. I will often ask new
members to identify themselves to the group, you only need to type in ‘hi, I
’m --- from --- ‘ and if you don’t want to take part further you can just
read what everyone else has to say. But we do encourage everyone to take
part in the discussion.
All our Chat sessions are recorded and saved as Word documents. If anyone
misses a Chat that they really wanted to attend I can send the record as an
email attachment.
If you need any more information about how to take part, please email me at:
msparrow@csolve.net
Hope to see you at our next session!
Maggie Sparrow
Barrie, ON, Canada
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