Archives for Category "Teaching"
Are You Going to Teach English?
Long sigh… yes. But it’s not what you think. I swore I would never teach English in China again, and, as far as the traditional classroom setting goes, I’m sticking to it. As a favor to a friend who helped me get a hotel room, however, I am giving him English lessons every day. Even one-on-one sessions can be aggravating, but thanks to the power of Blurt Out, a book that continues to prove useful after five years, I’ll make it through the next two weeks.
One thing I found interesting as I cracked open this magical book again was the second phrase it covers: Are you going to… It suddenly struck me as amusing how “Are you going to…” is a much longer, more tiring version of “Will you…” yet it’s the more common way of asking what someone’s up to (i.e. “Are you going to watch a movie?” vs. “Will you watch a movie?”). “Will you…” seems more fit for making requests, like, “Will you clean up this dog barf?” I guess you could make requests the other way, too. “Are you going to clean up this dog barf?” though that has a more negative ring to it.
Imagine trying to explain all this to someone whose English is… pretty meh. Oh, how the subtle differences between English phrases make teaching such a burdensome joy. I’m ecstatic to be doing this again.
Chinese Souvenirs: Changzhou Combs
I’ve already brought up Changzhou combs before, but as part of my recent string of souvenir posts, now’s a good time for a revisit. They mean a lot to me, after all, since they’re one of the few unique handicrafts from the area. I loved going into the comb stores and browsing through their huge inventories. It was like being a kid again in a baseball card shop. The combs are apparently magical, too. From the pamphlet:
It has been proved by modern medicine that often combing one’s hair with this kind of combs can ease one’s headache and sleeplessness and can refresh one’s mind, combing one’s hair with this kind of combs can also make one hear and see well.
I bought and was given many a comb while in Changzhou, but the set pictured has the most sentimental value. It was from a student. He presented it to me the day after his classmates were total brats during our last lesson together. It was sad, because, in class, he tried so hard to get them to be quiet. They wouldn’t, of course, and I finally had to cancel the game and do mundane vocabulary drills. Though he never said it, the combs felt like an apology on his class’s behalf.
How Does an EFL Teacher Teach Discipline?
In the comments of my last post, user Hopfrog asked about being too tolerant or too strict in class, which got me thinking about discipline in general. It’s always hard to establish fair discipline in the classroom, but EFL teachers face a few other obstacles. They typically don’t speak the native language, so verbally reprimanding bad students doesn’t work. Nor does trying to explain a complicated rewards system, because they just won’t get it. Foreigners, particularly in China, are also seen as a funny novelty and are rarely taken seriously as professional teachers. So how does an EFL teacher discipline their classes?
I wish I knew…
The Chinese teachers always made the naughty students stand up, so I tried that several times with mixed results. The middle school students would turn quiet whenever they had to stand, but the primary kids would either keep talking to their friends or take this as an opportunity to wander around the room. If I turned my back on them, they’d just sit down again. It got to the point where I had to take their chairs away, and if they still acted out, I made them wear their backpacks, too. Believe me, I don’t like that it had to come to that, and I was always trying to think of a better solution.
When I taught for ILP, we used a system that rewarded the kids with tokens whenever they spoke the target phrase correctly or what have you. This was to encourage them to listen and participate so they could earn enough tokens to exchange for prizes at the end of the day. In theory, tokens are a great idea, but in practice, in the hands of inexperienced teachers, it easily falls apart. 70% of the time my students fought, they were fighting over tokens. If they felt like they deserved a token, but I didn’t give them one, they threw a fit and stopped participating. They usually only paid attention long enough to get a token, anyway, and gave up if you weren’t dishing them out fast enough.
I liked the idea of students being rewarded in some way for participating, but when I started teaching classes of 50 in Changzhou, I couldn’t afford to give candy or prizes to everyone. I had hoped that just calling attention to their good or bad behavior would be enough, whether it was drawing smiley and frowny faces on the chalkboard or putting green and yellow cards in a bag. Only the good kids cared about me assessing their behavior, though, while the bad kids just wanted to see how many yellow cards I would put in before giving up. In the case of the bag, near the end of class, we would take out a card. If it was green, we played a game for the last five minutes. Some classes responded well to this, but most just didn’t care.
It’s frustrating when everything you try to get them to settle down fails. I know I said before that a good lesson could compensate for that, but let’s face it, even the most well-crafted lessons crumble when the students aren’t in the mood to learn English today. But rather than yell at the kids, which never worked and usually got more laughs than scared looks, the best thing I could do was to stop. Stop everything, stand there, and wait for them to be quiet. If we were playing a fun game, well, guess what, the game just got put on hold. If we were doing a normal lesson, maybe the students were glad I finally shut up. I had to wait five minutes sometimes before I could go on, and I felt like I was going to explode inside, but I wasn’t going to teach if they weren’t going to listen. And they eventually saw that, too.
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 a lot.
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.
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