上课, Teaching.

I taught my first class today, and it was great. I’ve learned that the more I perform and make a fool of myself, the more students enjoy the class, and the better they feel about participating. Lots of running around and pantomiming got my students all speaking, and despite a girl who looked like her eyes were going to pop out of her head every time I called on her and a guy who refused to make eye contact, I think everyone had a pretty good time. The game that we played at the end of class (I wrote “true” and “false” above boxes on the board and had kids answer questions I asked them by racing to the board and touching the correct box first) had everyone excited and other classes that got out a little earlier than mine watching through our doors. My students are all “Radio and TV Directing” majors, and they have all taken English before, but most of them are very hesitant to speak. I had each one fill out a survey, and some of the best answers to questions are below:

What is your English name?

Lucky

Bluce Liu

Hao Long

Toxic

Enlighten

Star

Bunny

Wing

Cherry

Grom

Remiel

Cairn

Sorrry

What do you hope to learn in this class?

First: Grammar

Then: Rap off

“I hope to learn thinking better”

I wrote the above part after my first class, and now I’ve had a little time to reflect on my teaching job. I teach one class of art majors (described above) and four classes of freshman English majors. Here are some observations in no particular order.

Students are really shy. Their written English is much better than their spoken English, so one of my primary goals is to get people speaking as much as possible, and it’s a challenge. Some students refuse to talk. Some students talk at barely above a whisper. Some students ask their friends for the answer to whatever I asked them every time I send a question their way. I try to have one competitive activity in each class so that people are really motivated to speak, and those who are reluctant to speak or speak too quietly usually get easier questions or have to deal with me running to the other side of the room and shouting “WHAT?” respectively. These things seem to be working, but slowly. Another thing that I’m trying to do is speak some Chinese in each class. This works because I inevitably make some (or a lot) of mistakes, which I’m hoping shows students that it’s ok to make mistakes. As my Chinese gets better, I’ll try to speak more to help explain directions and to help people feel comfortable.

Students pick really silly names sometimes. The above names are a good sample. I have students called: Voltaire, Tubaha 1900 (your English name, not your WoW screenname), Rain, Sky Fire, Stone (all four elements), and many more. The students who don’t have English names I either think of an English name that sounds like their Chinese name, give them a name that seems suitable (but they usually manage to do this on their own: Cairn is huge and built like a pile of rocks, toxic looks like a gothic punk rocker) or name them after one of my friends. This last one seems odd at first, but it helps me remember their names, and they can be happy knowing that they are named after someone who I like.

Some of my non-major students never bring their stuff to class. For the first couple classes I had to hand out 5 or 6 pens per class. After a little while, I threatened to make people buy pens when they forgot to bring one. Then, I had a better idea and found a giant pencil and now I give it to students who forget their pen. The embarrassment has kept the pen-forgetters from forgetting frequently, and now they at least ask for a pen from their classmates when they forget.

At the start of my class, I took pictures of each of the students in the class below their English name on the board. This helps me study their names in-between classes. Without fail, the first time I tell students that I want to take their picture, I get absolutely bug-eyed, mortified looks. “You want ME to go up THERE in front of the whole class so you can take my picture??” Really, the bug-eyed mortified looks are not too uncommon. I’ve started using a badminton shuttle-cock 羽毛球 to call on people (and have them call on each other) to help randomize who I call on, and when it lands in front of someone or hits them on the head as sometimes happens, they look absolutely terrified. The other look I get from students on occasion is pure vitriol. I sometimes move students from the back to the front of class, or call on students who have been playing games on their phones, and they always look both horribly wounded and pretty angry.

Playing games is great. I play lots of games that I used to play in Spanish class, like “race to the board” where students have to race to the board and write the answer to the question I’ve asked. The first to do so scores a point for their team. I like to play hangman, but if I use the vocab words from the book, students count the number of letters in the word and guess whole words with the same number of letters rather than guessing individual letters. I played a game last class where I post a story on the wall and students work in teams of two. One has to go look at the story, then repeat it in parts to their partner who re-writes the story. The students loved the game, but it wasn’t a great success because:

Students cheat a lot! More than you would believe. In the story game, several students just stole the story off the wall to copy. Once I stopped that, some students just took photos of the story with their cell phones and then copied from there. The team that won cheated a lot, as did the 2^nd place team, so I refused to give them the promised prize for the game. I think maybe the next time I play that game I’ll make anyone who I catch cheating re-start.

Pretty much all of the students are stoked to have a foreign teacher. I handed out a questionnaire to all of my students on the first day of class, and my last question is for them to write one thing that they would like to ask me. I answer pretty much all of their questions on the next day of class. I get a lot of the same questions: Why are you in China? Do you like it here? Do you like Chinese food? What’s your QQ number? Do you have a girlfriend? How long will you stay here? Who’s your favorite basketball star? What’s your favorite color? All of my students say hi to me outside of class, and when I’m out playing basketball or tennis, my students love to join in (for basketball) or watch (for tennis).

In all, I’m really enjoying teaching so far. I think that if I walk out of a class and think it was fun for me, it probably was for most of the students. Classes where I come out going “ooh, that was painful,” the students probably think the same thing. I think I’m going to show a movie in my class, right now I’m thinking “Cool Hand Luke” because the English is pretty easy to understand, and it has a lot of American culture. Let me know if you have any other good ideas for American movies to show to the class. Off to go lesson plan for this week.