How'd I Get Myslef Into This Mess?

How in the world did they let me become a teacher? I don't know much about the Chinese education system in general but I can't think too highly of it if they let me teach classes. I guess you could say that I don't really have less experience then half the TA's you see in America, while I guess that's true in general they are at lest supposed to have some sort of knowledge in the area that they are teaching. The only thing I have that even resembles a qualification is that I'm a native English speaker and honestly I've seen a number of Chinese teachers here who speak English well enough to do my job, and probably have been teachers for more the 5 minutes. So with about 10 hours total of training, little idea what to do with the class, and no idea of what to expect from the students I marched off into the fray to try to teach these kids something. Well all that complaining aside it went pretty well. It was only my first day but it certainly could have gone worse and parts of it went quite well. I made a fairly detailed lesson plan, but luckily I realized that since I know nothing about teaching half the ideas probably wouldn't work and I came with a lot of back up plans.

The classrooms, which I scoped out yesterday, are not what you would call particularly modern. It's basically a blackboard and a bunch of desks, the area in front of the class where I stand is raised up about half a foot. About half the students were there when I got there about 15 minutes early. I tried to chat with some of the students but I mostly just got giggles from the girls, who make up about 80% of both my classes. It seems the boys are the ones who essentially want to hang out with me and be friends, but more on that in a sec. When class finally began my first 3 activities pretty much bombed right away. Getting these classes to brainstorm or call out anything is sort of like pulling teeth, it's painful as hell and they really don't want to budge. Even doing things that I know they were interested in like getting them to ask me questions, they just sort of stared back at me. I was starting to get worried at this point so I went onto my next activity which involves through a little ball I made out of Saran Wrap around the room and whoever catches it has to tell one fact about themselves. Now the students essentially try to jump out of the way of this ball to avoid catching it but that actually makes for half the fun as it bounces of peoples head and the like. Basically if they tired to avoid it I just handed it to them when it fell on the floor. This actually ended up being a lot of fun.

The next game I tried was Hangman which also worked well. Even though it involved them calling out stuff a letter is easy for them to do since there is no right answer and once you get close someone will really want to call out the word. It really cracked them up also because they guessed a bunch after only one letter. They got China on C and English on E and University on S for some reason. I sort of pretended to be exasperated and they were having a good time. One of the people who did the training during the CIEE stuff said not to be an "Edutainer" but honestly I'll tak what keeps them engaged. I found the most successful ideas were anything where they divided up into groups and came up with something, things they want to learn, places to go, etc, and then shared it one at a time. This idea has problems, they talk a lot in Chinese, and only one group can share at a time, but it keeps them occupied and working on something productive in English. The class behaved alright but took a lot of convincing to get them to go out in the hall for a group photo and even then a few stranglers never came out.

After the class finally ended some of the students invited me back to their dorm room to talk for a while. The few male students in the class seem to always want to be friends and chat about basketball. The dorm room was amazingly Spartan. There were 8 beds in an area smaller then my living room no air or heat and beds that were basically a mat over hard wood. They were all really nice and even got me a soda as after 2 hours of standing in a 30 degree class room I was pouring sweat. I talked to them for a while before going back to my room to cool off before my next class. Before the class started I was looking though a class book and I heard clicking noises and every time I looked up 6 or 7 of the girls had there cell phone cameras out taking pictures. As soon as I looked up though they would snap the away. I signaled that it was OK to take some pictures and smiled for some. The next class went a lot better in the beginning since I just ditched the things that didn't work so well and focused on a few of the activities. When I said hello to start the class the all answered back in unison "Hello!" which makes me think they are trained to do it and cracked me up. Also when someone asked where I was from and I said America I got a big collective "ooooh" and again for Washington DC. When I said my name was Daniel they all also said "Daniel!" which started me laughing again. The class went more smoothly and at the end when I wanted to them to go out for a picture they all were very cooperative. Maybe it was because they were only Freshmen while the first class was Sophomores. All in all things went well though I wish I could get them to use more English in the class.