Archives for Category "Teaching"
Teaching in Retrospect
It only takes a few weeks of being back in your hometown to feel like everything you’ve done prior—all that time spent fighting for the attention of hungry Chinese students—never happened. Or it did happen, but everything you thought you learned from the experience… well… never happened. Or it did happen, but… nah, I think I’m done with that joke.
Your time as a teacher is easily justified as wasted, especially during those final evaluations when only one or two of the students can repeat a concept you spent the whole semester drilling. But most teaching positions in China are very impersonal, anyway, and your job isn’t so much about teaching a specified amount of content as it is just giving the kids a chance to have a teacher who isn’t Chinese. In a way, foreign teachers are there to break cultural boundaries, not necessarily teach, but if a little English is learned along the way, more power to you!
Some of my students still stay in touch with me, though, so I didn’t walk away with nothing. And as a young fish out of water standing in front of a class of 50 restless Chinese kids four times a day, your comfort zone naturally grows. Maybe you find you’ve only become comfortable addressing non-native English speakers, but progress is progress! When you tell people you taught in China, they’re just impressed by the word “teach,” if they’re impressed at all, but to you, it’s not that. To you, it was a lesson in confidence and endurance and resisting the urge to crap your pants and run home crying when things go bad.
Things go bad all the time.
As much as I liked my ILP classes (the first teaching I ever did in China), those kids were awful. Class time with the foreigners was “release hours of pent up energy that our Chinese teachers would beat us for” time. They would fight each other. They would pull their pants down. They would yell and throw things at the teacher. They would literally tear the desks apart. But through all that, I finally learned to just be patient and focus on creating a better lesson instead of trying to create better students. That comes later, and it’s pretty much an uphill battle, anyway.
If there’s one thing you learn as an English teacher in China, it’s patience. There’s patience, because the kids’ English is bad, and there’s patience, because their behavior is bad. It was different, though, trying to be patient with my primary classes of 50 students as opposed to the ILP classes of eight. I’ll admit, I lost my temper sometimes. Things were said. Books were thrown out the window. Nonetheless, I’m a much better person now than I was five years ago, and China has played a big part in making me that way.
The Stressful Return From Overseas
It’s a little overwhelming how chores start to stack up when you’ve been abroad for almost two years. Now that I’m back home, I have a lot on my plate. I have to get my car re-insured and my driver’s license renewed. I have to take care of several doctors’ appointments before my coverage expires next month. I have to figure out what to do with all the crap I brought over from China and what to do with all the crap that was still here. I don’t even have a US cell phone yet and am hesitant to start shopping for one, because everyone I know complains about the plan they’re currently on.
Oh, and, at some point, I have to look for a new job.
In China, it was nice how my only responsibility was to show up to class four times a day and pretend to know what I was doing. The school took care of everything else. I think that’s one of the biggest draws to teaching in China: no responsibility! No bills to pay. No taxes to file. No cars to maintain (assuming you are sane enough not to drive in China). You don’t even need to take your job seriously. If you can sing and dance, most schools are happy to accommodate you. But being in the US again, I have to start making the calls myself and actually exercise some independence. Damn.
200 Students in One Day
I was originally planning to post a picture of all 16 classes, but I think one day is enough for you to get an idea of just how many students a foreign teacher has to work with:
It’s sad that I don’t even know who most of these kids are.
Pictionary a Chinese Stick Person
My last lesson with these students was supposed to be fun. Pictionary was supposed to be fun! But most of the kids don’t get it. I have words like “generous, polite, cousin, and handsome” that are, admittedly, kind of hard to draw, but that’s the whole point, and yet the students don’t even try. Usually, they’ll just draw two stick people standing next to each other, then shake their hands frustratedly while their team has no idea what to guess. Even the girl who was drawing “handsome” neglected to give the guy a face!
One of the words I threw in there was “great grandmother,” since family members was a recurring topic in our lessons. Every student who had this word drew… two stick people, of course. Neither one of the stick people looked old. But one of them was always holding a paper. I could not figure out why she was always holding a paper! So I discussed this with my girlfriend after work, and she said, “Well, you know, if you are great at something, you usually have a paper to show for it.”
Starting the Goodbye Lesson
After the students presented their homework assignment, I made the announcement, “Today is our last class together.” I had to say this several times, because, apparently, nobody ever taught them what “last” meant. But when they got it, they all started yelling, “Why?! Why are you leaving us?! You will come back, right?!”
The funny thing about leaving a school is how so many students take this as an opportunity to get you to sign your name on everything they own. At the summer camp I went to in Hefei several years ago, the students wanted all the foreign teachers to sign their T-shirts, notebooks, CDs, water bottles, cleavage, used tissues, and stale slices of bread. It makes you feel like a celebrity… and makes you feel like your students really will miss you.
Well, maybe they’ll just miss those 40 minutes of freebie class time. That’s the impression I got when I left the primary school. The difference between them and my middle school students, though, is that the latter also want my e-mail address. I was always hesitant to give this out in the past, afraid of getting e-mails that said, “Hello!” over and over, but the students who already have it are able to carry an intelligent conversation. Maybe I am walking away from this school with something after all.
EFL Adverb Game
One of the few benefits to teaching primary was how the students had no problem getting up in front of class and doing something silly. In middle school, the students can’t even stay at their desk and answer a simple question without getting red in the face. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by everyone’s reluctance to play something like charades, though the first few classes gave me a false sense of success. They actually had fun.
To begin, I asked the class to brainstorm ten different adverbs and wrote these on separate cards. Next, I had them give me ten actions and wrote these on a different set of cards. One student then came to the front and drew two cards: one action, one adverb. They had to act out what the cards said, and the class would guess. Obviously, it’s an easy activity, but the fun lies in some of the crazy combinations that turn up:
sleep angrily
surf the Internet crazily
smile slowly
kill people carefully
play hide and seek carelessly
It would be a great game to play at a party, but… most of my students weren’t too thrilled. They would draw the cards, fidget for about two minutes, show the cards to everyone on the front row, fidget for another two minutes, then start talking in Chinese and go sit down. There was one class, though, that was eagerly waiting for someone to draw the “dance” card. When a boy finally did, their Chinese teacher came into the room and said, “The students have a test and must go now.” He didn’t dance. Everyone was disappointed.
Homework as a Language Opportunity
When I first started giving homework assignments, I was mostly interested in just forcing the students to think about my lessons after class. But there’s more to it than that. We spend the first ten minutes of class presenting random assignments, and that’s ten minutes I don’t have to prepare new material for!
Seriously, though, I find presenting homework to be a beneficial exercise in getting the students to listen to each other for a change. I know the school system wants them to listen to me for the entire 45 minutes, but once I leave, they’re going to be saying, “Pardon?” to every English speaker they know. So after a student reads what they wrote, I’ll ask several other students to repeat or explain what they heard. Now that they know I will do this, it’s one of the few times the whole class is actually quiet.
Many of my assignments have been based on the students drawing something (like an island or a monster) and then describing it. These are the kind of assignments that don’t even feel like homework, because the students jump at a chance to be creative for once (their Chinese teachers would never let them draw a monster in class). When I asked students to read some of the first assignments we did, nobody wanted to volunteer. But when it came time to draw their island or monster on the chalkboard, I had to turn several away, because too many wanted to participate.
If on the Mind
Repeating the same lesson 16 times a week comes dangerously close to driving you insane. When, inside that lesson, you use the same question format 50 times, it does drive you insane. As part of my review, I’ve been going over if/then sentences and have been asking for a lot of examples. This also ties into our review of animals, so my questions follow this kind of pattern:
If rabbits had wings, then…
If dogs had horns, then…
If a giraffe is hungry, then…
If a kangaroo is bored, then…
After class, I suddenly can’t help myself from starting every sentence with “if.” On the bus to the park, I kept trying to talk to my girlfriend, but everything came out, “If we have noodles for dinner… If I get out of class at 5:00 tomorrow… If my legs really hurt today… What am I doing? Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
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