David's Big Adventure in China

I didn’t realize that teaching a few hours a week would be so much work! I have been very busy and didn’t get a chance to update the blog last week. Lesson planning takes a lot of time especially since I am new at this and the school has provided us zero guidance and support. I have two classes of freshmen majoring in business for a speaking class that meets twice a week. This is the only class for which the school has provided a textbook but after 1 week I have decided that the text is not much help. The oral English ability of most of the students is pretty low and most American 5 year olds can easily out talk them. On Monday of this past week I went in with a lesson plan but after asking some students about their weekends before class and getting blank stares because they didn’t understand my question I scrapped the lesson plan. I wrote a basic dialogue about weekend activities on the board and modeled it with one of the students then had the students practice it with each other. Then I randomly called students in 2’s to the front to demonstrate the dialogue. On Wednesday I gave the students the words to the song “Yesterday Once More” by the Carpenters since they told me the previous week that was once of their favorite songs. I had students take turns reading the words and we talked about the meanings and grammar features like the use of contractions then we sang it together. These two classes have about 40 students each.

I have 3 sessions of a class called “Practice”. I didn’t know until I had the first class that this would be 3 different groups of students and not 3 times a week with the same group. I had not been given a list of students so I didn’t know how many students I was supposed to have. I was not given a text, syllabus or any guidance about the expectations for this class. I had several students come up to me before the start of class of tell me they had trouble signing up for my class on the computer system and asked if they could join the class. Not knowing how the system works nor how many students I was supposed to have I said okay. Later, I talked to a couple of the other teachers and also my contact in administration I decided it was best not to allow any additional students to sit in. So in the second week of class I had to tell the students that if they were not officially registered they could not stay for the class. (I had obtained students lists by camping out in the admin office until they gave them to me.) The class size was limited to 20 and I had as many as 15 additional students wanting to sit in. Some of them were practically begging me to allow them to stay and it was tough to say no but the class is designed to be small for effective practice. All of these classes are in the evening and I was surprised to see that my Friday night class was 17 girls, 2 boys and 1 absent. I don’t know if the girls prefer having a male teacher or if the girls were more ambitious about getting signed up for their electives.

I also have a listening class that meets once a week and has 52 students. I was given no guidance about this class and at first was provided a classroom with no board but an AV system that couldn’t play a dvd and wouldn’t accept my USB portable drive. I managed to get this room changed to one that is much more functional. Actually, one of the students (the class monitor) managed to get it changed. For yesterday’s class I showed them an episode of “Friends” with English subtitles. Only about ¼ of the class was able to follow most of the dialogue and we stopped often to discuss the themes, aspects of American culture and words that were unfamiliar to them.

It seems the students in the practice classes are the most eager to learn since this class is an elective. In the Listening class and the Speaking classes many of the students are there only because it’s required and show little interest. There is a wide range of skill levels within the classes which makes lesson planning more difficult. The school makes no effort at determining students’ levels and putting students in classes with students at similar levels. In each class there is a student assigned as class monitor. I don’t fully understand yet the role of the monitors and how they are chosen but often they work as an intermediary between the students, teachers and administration. In one case the monitor gave me the student list for the class and told me I was supposed to submit my teaching plan to the administration.

At certain times of the day I see many students carrying big thermos bottles. They take them to a central place on campus where they can get hot drinking water. They like to drink their water hot and they also use it for making instant noodles. There are several cafeterias on campus and I now have my cafeteria card so I can eat in them. When I do, my meal costs from $.65 to $2.00. I do often eat simple meals in my apartment but I don’t do any real cooking. (PB&J, cereal, instant noodles, etc.) I can buy many western foods at a nearby Carrefour which is a French version of a more upscale Wal-mart. While I was there the other day I was browsing the meat department and saw a small animal that looked very much like a dog. I can’t imagine what else it was but will try to get a local to help me confirm what it was. The sights in the markets here are always interesting! There are all options for shopping……big department or chain stores (2 Wal-marts here), local small markets, and flea market style markets as well.

I have my passport now after having been without it for more than 2 weeks. It was being used by the local authorities to issue my resident permit and to get my Foreign Expert document (which looks like a passport). The resident permit allows me to live here in Kunming and the Foreign Expert document allows me to exchange Chinese currency into U.S. dollars. I can exchange up to 70% of my pay into dollars. I don’t expect to exchange much since I will most likely spend everything I earn.

Well that’s it for now. Tuesday is mid autumn day here (a big holiday) and next time I’ll tell you what it’s all about. Oh, a couple more things. I have been sitting in on a Chinese language class that meets four times a week with a bunch of French students and I’m still meeting with my tutor twice a week so hopefully my language skills will improve quickly. Also, the rainy season is over now and the weather has been beautiful, highs in the mid 70’s and lows in the low 50’s.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 4:22 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.