Tiger

I've finally gotten most of my classes down but my beginner Oral English class is giving me nightmares. I tried to do a game I thought was pretty easy. I broke them into groups and asked them a few basic questions all about sports, we'd talked about sports in a few classes. It was going OK not great but mostly people were trying to talk and were giving some sort of answer when called on. Then I got to the last question, "Is it better to be fast or strong?" I don't think this question is particularly difficult especially as I spent some time making sure people understand that the students understood what "strong" and "fast" meant. But when I asked people for their opinion one answer was simply, "Tiger." I'm not sure what exact lack of understanding confused them enough that tiger seemed like an appropriate answer but I'm sort of at a loss for what to do. Slav joked was that at least they were thinking outside the box, the problem is we as a class can't seem to locate the box.

The listening class with them is going better since it's more structured but this class is more free form which makes it a lot harder. In another class with them I tried to have them write dialogues, something they understood but it was just hell trying to keep people focused on task and working. And I'm worried that since we ran out of time half the groups will not have their dialogues with them next week when they are supposed to perform them even though I tried to stress that. The class has really three different compounding problems. First, despite being college aged they have about as much English training as some Chinese students get in primary school or middle school. Second, honestly they just aren't great students the number of people trying to surreptitiously look at their cell phones or sleep is higher than any class I've ever had, and I just don't have that much practice enforcing much stickier discipline. I got annoyed when I was trying to take role one day and everyone was just talking so I couldn't here who was there. I ended up having the class sit quietly for four minutes to practice "being quiet." Finally, it's a really big class 41 student is a lot when trying to get people to pay attention and make sure people are on task. Well mostly I just needed to rant. I wasn't sure what to expect when coming out to Alaer but having the most trouble with classes really wasn't it. I feel like all this focus on classes is making it harder to really see how Alaer is different from Changzhou which is really why I came out here.