Our first week teaching with V.E.T.
Yangshou, China.
It has been a very busy couple of weeks. We ended up leaving Fenghuang a couple of days later than I thought… the little shrimpies we had for dinner turned on us–me especially. I was up half of the night over a squatty potty being sick. Not as easy as it sounds (and I imagine it doesn’t sound too easy). I’ve gotten pretty used to the Chinese toilets and in some ways I prefer them to Western toiliets (in public bathrooms you don’t have to touch anything–often not even a stall door). It was a long night, and I was exhausted in the morning so we decided to wait another day before taking the overnight bus to Guilin. We left Tuesday morning, I think, so one week ago today. Everything went okay, I suppose. We had to take a two hour bus to the next nearest city where we booked our overnight bus to Guilin which would leave at 5:30 pm. So we had about two hours to sit and relax and make sure my stomach was holding up. The overnight bus was pretty nice. It was similar to the bus that we took from Beijing to the Mongolian border in that it had beds instead of seats. The woman who was organizing the bus stuff (taking tickets and that sort of thing) wouldn’t let us put our backpacks under the bus in the storage compartments. Instead she put them on the floor at the back of the bus, so we ended up having to take two beds on the bottom bunk at the back of the bus (the beds are set up two high and three across the width of the bus–and maybe ten beds along the length, so 30 in all). The road to Guilin was not paved and was so full of pot holes that I didn’t sleep at all and literally flew up out of the bed a few times! It was nuts. Not fun at all. We stopped around 3 a.m. for a pee break, and I was so tired that I tripped in the aisle and fell down. All of the Chinese people laughed at me and it was so disconcerting. I wasn’t hurt, but I was exhausted and it wasn’t fun to be laughed at. We arrived in Guilin pretty early in the morning, but the bus just stopped at the station and they let anyone who wanted to stay in the bus and get some sleep until the sun came up. Small mercies. So we ended up getting a couple of hours of sleep before getting up and looking for a taxi. We had already picked what hostel we wanted to go to–a little expensive at 120 yuan a night, but it was near a lot of restaurants and we’d have our own bathroom, so it was worth the splurge. We had to wait a couple of hours until someone checked out of our room, so we ordered scrambled eggs and toast and had our first Western meal in a long time. It was delicious.
For two days we hung around Guilin, eating some Western food (and some Chinese) and sleeping in and watching dvds in the hostel. We figured out voting (with the help of Laura), and mailed in our ballots certified mail which cost about $50! But it’s worth it to make sure they got there in time. We took the bus to Yangshou on Friday and it was a pleasant 1 1/2 ride through beautiful scenery. The karst mountains are just gorgeous. They seem completely unreal. I’ve seen them before in Chinese paintings, but I just thought they were fake–exaggerations for the sake of art. But they’re real, and breathtaking. For the first few days in Yangshou, we’d forget that they were out there. In the mornings you’d like out the window and just be shocked at what you saw. It was a little disorienting, but really fun and exciting.
When we got to Yangshou we met Laurie. Laurie is from Canada, but has been living in China for 6 years and he started the VET program (stands for Volunteering English Teachers). It’s a nonprofit program that goes into country schools around Yangshou (4 elementary schools and 1 high school vocational school) and helps the students with their English for 2 45 minute classes day. We work with 3rd through 6th graders, so roughly aged 10 through 14. The Chinese government recently made it compulsory for all students in China to start learning English starting in the 3rd grade. But there aren’t that many Chinese teachers who can speak English–especially not in the countryside. So the students are taught English through repetition with no understanding and often no oral English. It’s baffling. So VET takes native English speakers into the schools and helps the students learn the meaning of the words their learning and most importantly hear the language so they can work on their pronounciation.
On Monday Stephen I started off with some training. We were both so relieved! Laurie’s wife, Betts, works for another organization that places English teachers in schools all around China. There was a new teacher on Monday who was being trained, so we got to go, too. We learned a lot about how the Chinese classroom works–the teachers stand at the front on a raised platform, behind a high desk. They never sit down or walk amongst the students. They learn by memorizing everything (so, really, they don’t learn). The teachers are required to go through the material at a set pace. They just have to get through it no matter what. The students are tested by the government at the end of each term and their grades literally determine the outcome of their life. If they don’t get high enough scores, they can’t go on to high school. If they don’t go on to high school, they’re farmers for the rest of their life. No chances. And now with the mandatory English starting in the 3rd grade, that’s just one more course the kids have to pass in order to succeed. A lot of the students resent learning English. For a lot of them, not learning English means not getting to get an education and improve their lives. It’s depressing.
But we also learned some good ideas for trying to get the kids involved in learning. Make it fun and interesting. And we don’t teach the Chinese way–we use games and art and songs to help teach the kids and get them engaged. We try to make English a little bit fun while also teaching them what they need to know. Betts has done studies on the success of our students, and they score 5% higher on their English tests than students who we don’t teach. Not that big of a difference, but also a huge difference when you think of the consequences. So for two days we did training with Betts and thought about lesson plans and what we wanted to teach them. It’s all very basic, preschool level stuff–colors, parts of your body, the alphabet. On Wednesday we went out for the first time into the classrooms and watched Gordon and Sue–two other volunteers who got here two weeks before us and will leave at the end of next week. It was great to see what they did. For me one of the most educational things was seeing how Sue worked on classroom management. The students don’t know English. You have a classroom of ten year-olds and you can tell them to please quiet down or to sit down. You can’t explain to them what you want them to do. It’s all about acting things out and helping them through things until they get the hang of it. And they’re all so smart! Once they understand what you want them to do they’re excited about it (and sticker prizes add a little incentive!). One of the first things that Sue does when she goes in the classroom is say hello and tell them her name. Then she asks them all to stand up, then sit down, stand up, sit down, and she throws in a little sit down, sit down to see if they’re listening and they all giggle and really like it. It gets their attention, it gets them listening and moving around, but it also teaches them “Please sit down” which is important when they’re all up running around! I decided to do the same thing with my classes, but add in Stop! with a loud clap so that hopefully I could eventually just clap and they’d know to stop and quiet down. We’ll see how it works out!
Our first class on our own was at a very small little school where there were only about ten kids in each class. They only had one 3rd grade and one 4th grade class, so we decided to team up and take turns with each class. Steve and I taught the 4th graders first while Sue and Gordon taught the 3rd graders, and then we switched. Steve led the 4th grade class and they were really good and really smart. We went over the body parts (which Sue and Gordon had been working on with them before) and then we started on clothing and did a little bit of “hat goes on head” and the like. The picked up on it right away and quickly went through all of the stuff we had planned! We had about 20 minutes left in the class and no more ideas planned! But with a little creativity and quick thinking we decided to do a modified version of the hokey pokey. Instead of “right hand” and “left hand” we just did “one hand” and “one foot.” And to make it last longer we did both in/out and up/down. They loved it! It was adorable. We felt like big successes. But then we switched classes and we went to the third graders. They were obviously just done. They’d already had English lessons for 45 minutes and now we were coming for another 45 and they’d just had enough. There were 8 students in the class and only about 3 of them were interested in us at all. A handful of boys were doing Chinese homework, and two girls were having a great time very obviously mocking me as I tried to go over the clothes. It was crappy. But we made it through it, and I successfully just ignored the bad ones and focused on the good ones that were having fun. We sang “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” and I tried to play one game, but it didn’t quite work out how I planned. I had put the alphabet on the board and was going to call out a letter and have two of them race to point at it, but one little girl came up and started saying the alphabet. I realized pretty quickly that she didn’t actually know it. We had said it all as a class and they seemed to have it down, but now I realized that while the whole class was saying it a lot of students were just mumbling. So I started having them come up one at a time and say it to me while the rest of the class talked and was crazy. I gave a sticker once they finished saying the whole thing (with a lot of help from me when they got stuck and I also corrected their pronounciation). A couple of students kept running up to the board because they wanted a turn for a sticker, but I just asked them to sit down and then ignored them. Eventually one of the girls who had been mocking me all of the class sat down quietly and raised her hand, so I felt like I’d made a little breakthrough. I also decided that next week I won’t try to teach anything outright to the second class on Wednesdays since I feel like 1 1/2 hours of English is way too much for 10 and 11 year olds. So instead I’m going to prepare some games for outside, songs, and maybe some art projects if it’s rainy (which it is now). That way they’ll get 45 minutes of class and 45 minutes of play but they’ll still be hearing English and hopefully singing along with us.
I think my first class not going so well was good in a lot of ways. I realized that I need to bring so many ideas and supplies that we could never possibly run out of things to do. That way, too, if something isn’t working we can do something else. I also realized that clothing isn’t so much fun to teach. For Thursday I decided to completely change gears and work on colors. Colors are more fun and then I could give them a neat color by number worksheet I found. So Thursday went so much better. We ended up being late so we missed our first class. Our van didn’t come on time and in order to get to the school you had to drive a ways and then take a ferry across a little river. We missed the ferry and had to wait for the next one. But since we were late we just played outside with the students who were out there. I think it helped them get more comfortable around us and not be so shy. We took the fourth grade class (with this school we would have taught 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th with Sue and Gordon doing the 3rd then the 6th and us doing the 4th then the 5th). I started with Sue’s stand up and sit down and it worked really well. Then I taught them the words: walking, hop, running, and stop and we got in a circle around the classroom and sang a song I found online to the tune of ‘are you sleeping’ that just went: walking, walking; walking walking; hop, hop, hop; hop, hop, hop; running, running, running; running, running running; stop! So I got to start working on my yelling stop and clapping and we all got to sing and walk, hop, and run around the classroom. It was a big hit and turned out to be a good way to start the class both for them and me. Then I went over the colors, and quickly realized that they already knew most of them. Then we did a word find of the colors and I gave them each a sticker when they finished (I like giving sticker prizes, but I think each student should get one and it shouldn’t be for winning in a game. The prize for the game should be the game or even the winning, not a sticker). And then when they were all done I put them into teams and had them to the color by number. They were all so nice and we hung them on the board when they were done and they all swarmed around looking at each other’s work. One team had gotten confused on which was red and which was brown, so I just changed it for them so they still had it right and there’s looked different. It was a really nice class. I felt so happy and successful afterwards! The class had over 30 kids in it, but it really went well and they all were really well behaved. No mocking me. No students working on other things. It was a good day.
On Friday we go to a high school vocational school. Vocational school is a new thing in China. When students can’t pass their exams to move on to high school, now they have the chance to go to vocational school. The school we go to is specifically for teaching about the hospitality business. The students are around 16 and at all different levels of understanding English. Steve and I taught a class of about 20 girls. Sue and Gordon had already been going over a script about reserving a room at a hotel, so we were just continuing with their lesson. It was two hours of class with a break in the middle. We went over the script the first hour and had them stand up in pairs and practice out loud with us helping with their pronounciation. We realized in the first hour that a handful of the girls were just completley lost. Some of them could barely say ‘hello’ in English. Since all of the students came from different rural schools and stayed in dorms on campus, they were at all different levels as far as English goes. For the second hour I took 5 girls who were really struggling and we went outside and sat and I worked with them individually. I think they really liked it. One girl either needs glasses or just doesn’t even know the alphabet. I wrote down the script for her. She seemed sort of thankful but also just nervous. I don’t think we’ll be able to do this kind of one-on-one teaching once Sue and Gordon leave since we’ll have to teach on our own then (unless more volunteers come). But while we have the opportunity I’m going to take advantage of it.
I’ve definitely gained a new respect for teachers over the past week. Planning lessons is very time consuming and I find myself obsessing a little over what to teach and if they’ll like it and what to do with this class, this student. But it’s nice that each day is a different school and a different class. I can use my colors lesson for every class next week except for the one I’ve already used it on! I know it works and I’m comfortable with it. I even had a few things to do that we didn’t get to during that lesson, so I can use them somewhere else if something doesn’t work out. I’m glad that I’m enjoying it and that I seem to have a lot of patience for it since I’m applying for graduate school to teach reading. But hopefully when I get a real job it won’t be with a classroom of students and they won’t speak only Chinese!
Other than teaching we’ve been really busy. We’re staying in a room at Owen College, one of many English language colleges around Yangshou. We get free room and board–we’re fed three meals a day Monday through Friday in the cafeteria in exchange for giving an hour long talk once a week to the college students who are interested. My talk is this Monday and I’m really looking forward to it. With seeing them at mealtimes and playing lots of ping pong (I’m even better than some of them which is saying a lot since I’m not very good!) we’re making lots of friends. There are about 50 students at Owen and I’m slowly learning their names and talking with all of them. My favorites so far are DoDo (they all have English names, but some, like DoDo, just used part of their Chinese name for their English name)–a fire cracker of a girl who is smart and strong willed. She’s been my ping pong partner when we play doubles before dinner and helped me get a hair cut. Terry, who is such a happy guy. He had fun teaching me some Chinese (bad words, of course) on the way out to the bars on Friday night for Halloween. Phoebe, who is one of the teachers and is going to teach us Mah Jong. And Jesse (who everyone calls Panda and is very pretty) who left this weekend to go back home but was very sweet and friendly. We talk to new students every day and we had a great time on Halloween with them. The teachers set up all kinds of games including a watermelon carving contest and bobbing for apples. They were so creative with the watermelon carving. They looked really awesome. But they couldn’t get the hang of bobbing for apples. A few of them got the apples with the stems, but Steve had to show them had to push them to the bottom and bite into them. I even got one, pushing it to the side of the bucket so I didn’t get my hair wet! Very lady-like. I think they were all really impressed. After the games we went out to West Street–an touristy area of town with lots of Western restaurants. We went to a bar where if you bought a drink they’d paint your face and I became a pretty awesome looking vampire. I posed in lots of photos with random Chinese people all around town, pretending to bite their necks! It was really fun. Then we went dancing! Oh, dancing with Chinese people. It was funny and crazy. They were really into doing things as a group–making a circle and having one person in the middle or doing a sort of jumpy conga line. At one point Steve and I started to realize that we could sort of control the crowd. Along with Sue and Gordon we were the only Westerners in the bar and everyone seemed to look to us for how to dance. It was a strange sense of power. I’d put my hands up and start clapping and then the whole place would be clapping wiht their hands up. I’d stop and everyone would stop! We left to go out around 7 p.m. and didn’t make it home until 2! It was a really fun night which ended with meeting a very nice lady named Grace who was from China but had lived in the US for 12 years with her husband. We met her at a bar-b-que stand where Steve was ordering some meet and lotus root on sticks and she shared her entire eggplant that had been grilled and then cut up and covered in garlic and chilly. It was nice to sit down and talk a little in English without having to think to much about what words to use and struggling to understand what the person talking to you was saying. It’s exhausting talking slowly! Especially for me since I talk so fast!
I think that’s about it. It rained last weekend and now it’s raining this weekend, so we haven’t actually seen any of Yangshou except for on the way out to the schools (some of which are gorgeous). I’ve seen water buffalo standing in the rivers flicking their giant ears (which stand straight out from the sides of their heads and look really goofy). I’ve seen fields of rice and watched them cut it down and put it through a machine that takes off the rice kernels. And I’ve seen it drying in big flat squares where they take a stick broom over it to turn everything around. I’ve seen wet noodles drying on a rack and piles of dried persimmons (which are everywhere this time of year and supposedly delicious. I haven’t tried them yet). It’s been really nice. We have a giant room all to ourselves with views of the mountains and our own bathroom. I like it here. I’m glad we’re staying for the month, and I’m also glad that if we really like it we can stay longer and save more money. During the week we literally spend nothing since we’re fed and transported around. I bought a cardigan for 15 yuan (about $2) the other day since it’s getting chilly here (which is nice since it was hot and humid all last week while we were teaching–I thought I was back in Alabama!). And then on weekends we get to splurge on Western food! Yesterday I had a tuna fish sandwich on a homemade baguette with french fries and a double thick chocolate milk shake. It was decident bliss. Chinese food is delicious, but sometimes you need a little bit of home and a little bit of variety. And Chinese food doesn’t fill me up like Western food. We eat dinner at 5:30 and by 9 I’m starved. But we found a bakery nearby that sells little loaves of banana bread and they’ve become an after-dinner staple. So we’re doing well and we’re happy. We’ll see how the next week of classes go and if we stay this way! Now that a new internet cafe opened up really close by I’ll try to keep up with the blog more. Hopefully having the colors lesson plan all ready will help free up some of my evenings.
Tags: China, free volunteering in China, teaching English, V.E.T
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