First week of Teaching in a Chinese Middle School (part 2)

Part 2 of a 3 part post on my first week of teaching in a Chinese middle school.

Read part 1.

It just so happens that 4 out of 7 GC students here want to be teachers, and while I am the only one who has had my student teaching experience, 4 of us are more comfortable than the others. Therefore, they don’t see the current “method” of scheduling us to teach as an issue, because they think we generally do very well. I think they see us all as good teachers just because we teach the only way we know to teach – the American way, which is much more affective than the Chinese way (which is simply copying the teacher, and the teacher reading the the lesson straight from the book, word for word). It is not creative. It is not engaging. It is down-right boring. Students chant monotonous words or sentences after the teacher to “learn” the information.

I have been asked to mainly teach the lowest level of English learners: Junior, Grade 1. These students are maybe 7,8,9,10, or 11 years old. Mostly 8-10 years old, and have learned English for about a month. I don’t speak enough Chinese to communicate with them and they don’t really understand my English. It’s pretty hard to teach and I have no idea how to teach new English-learners. The older classes (Senior Grade 1-4) can communicate with us pretty well, have solid conversations with us, and benefit from us more.

The students treat us even more like celebraties than we ever experienced in Nanchong. They run up to us and grab our hands and ask us to be their friend, sign their paper, take a picture with them, give them our phone number and e-mail address, and about 1,483 other questions. They follow us and stop us and make it hard for us to go anywhere. They take pictures or movies of us in class with their phones. During breaks between classes when teachers are grabbing us and pulling us every-which-way, students are filling us the room, backing us/trapping us into a corner and yelling at us to talk to them and be their friend. Some teachers act as bodyguards for us and some have to blow whistles constantly to get them to leave the office, and that doesn’t always work. And whistles are supposed to be used for really serious situations. It.is.intense.

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