Doing the Whole Teacher Thing

I actually had to spend most of the day getting ready for class, for comparisons sake one hour is usually more than enough preparatory time. Last week I had them do group projects where they were supposed to come up with a game or activity to teach English, most of the them are going to be teachers, and many will be English teachers. The games they came up with were essentially OK but a lot of groups had problems with either getting flustered and falling back into a lot of Chinese or having only one person do all the talking. Also I had them write me a one page paper about what they were doing half of which came out looking like they had written it on the back of a napkin. I gave two of the classes a lecture about how the presentation of work reflects on its quality, a lecture I actually remember getting in high school. But after I did all that I had to figure out their grades and record them all. That would have taken long enough but I didn't want to just call the grades out in front of the whole class, probably could have gotten away with doing that though, so I put each kids grade, including a breakdown of how it was arrived at, on a separate sheet of paper. Formatting and arranging all that took most of the day. In the end I had to give them all a pretty generous curve just to bring the average up to about 82%, it was something like 74% before.

I was also correcting some of the papers that I got from my class that is going to England. Two of them were just directly copied from another website. I'm officially done with some of these kids they put in basically no effort. They're going to completely fail when they get to England. Honestly I'll be surprised if any of them besides Carrie actually compete a degree there. At this point I expect at least one kid to get kicked out for plagiarism. If some of these kids manage to pass I think it will only mean that this school is selling degrees. Some of them have so little English and even the ones who didn't copy their papers were totally confusing. Only Carrie managed to write a clear coherent paper. I'm going to try to tell the person again that I think this will be a disaster but knowing China they'll just shrug it off.