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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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2008 Schedule |
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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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