teaching thoughts; I'm doing okay after all, despite blahblahdoubts
Watermelon: it's what's for breakfast!
Finally went back to the market this morning. Yesterday, actually, but then today, too. It is very nice to be able to. There was one guy trying to dick me around on prices for 毛蛋 (rambutans), and we wasted five minutes on him changing the price from 30kuai to 35 to 20 to 60, at which point I walked off in a show of irritation.
Been planning and teaching all week, and, as suspected, the classes went better than my stress of the last few posts indicates. I'm doing well! The students are doing well! They are participating in class and everything!
That sounds like a low standard to measure by, maybe, but I am not being facetious: teaching students here is an exercise in "keep them going", and oh man this is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't taught, but: there's a pattern you have to overcome when you teach here - that of sitting, listening, standing and reciting - and overcoming it is what I struggled with last semester. I realized that the classes I enjoyed most were the ones where people were the loudest and most involved. I already knew it but i'll say it again: I don't want to lecture. Their expectance of me lecturing is what I have to invert, and I think I did a good thing when explaining, "my Speaking classes are about fluency, so you guys will have to talk a lot, and about different kinds of things."
And it's true. I'd rather be practical and teach practical stuff than be Srs and teach test-necessary stuff.
(And of course I wonder - is that bad? Tests are, after all, really really big in Chinese society. On the other hand! If they want to go study abroad, or talk to foreigners, or be employued with their English skills, they'll need to know useable things. So ..... I still come down on the side of practicality.)
Let's take Debate as an example. I was told by my colleague (the same one for whom Every Conversation Is A Contest) that it must be British Parliamentary Debate, and got shown all these rules and whatever. We met up before the class, for me to figure out WTH I was even teaching. My colleague was all full of advice. Such as:
"They have to know these rules if they're going to compete."
"Debate is a blood sport."
"It's just two books. They have five weeks."
"I wanna get them out of that wimpy style of talking they have."
"They don't know how to say no. I get up in their faces about that."
"They don't know how to think."
"I always pick on the girls. I tell them 'girls should not have equal access to education in China', and they have to tell me I'm wrong. And in all these classes, only one girl was smart enough to say, 'no, they should have more.'"
"I want them to have fun, because that's important."
...........yes, ladies and gents, this is one of the people I work with.
Some of these things have some basic truths to them, sure (learning how to directly say 'no', having fun, debate is indeed sportish/gamelike). So I pull those out of the dross. (And work really hard to ignore the dross, although there's times I just have to correct him:
- 委婉 might be "wimpy" in his eyes, but it's also courtesy, and it's also more complicated and ingrained than that;
- it's not that they don't know how to think, it's that 1) analytical/critical thought isn't fostered and reinforced from an early age; 2) they don't have safe and reliable outlets to express what they think, and 3) the nail that sticks up gets hammered down;
- reading even one whole book in another language can be HARD GODDAMN WORK, which I know from having such a hard time getting through the Children's book I am still bulling my way through.
- it's not that the girls are less smart (in fact they tend consistantly to have higher grades than the guys (which I blame on 1) having to prove yourself at an engineering school and 2) having to prove yourself among a bunch of men)), it's that they're quieter, because the gender roles here dictate that should be the case. So "picking on the girls" is irritating because they are just as capable, they just need to be allowed/reassured that it's okay to be loud.
Blah blah blah. For the curious, this is how I did it:
I went in, grouped them in 3's, and told them to think aloud (in English!) about the two questions on the board: What Do You Try To Do In Debating, and What Do You Have To Think About [during debating]. Five minutes to think, then put hte answers on the board; leave that aside of a moment, and bring up one from each group.
(This causes a stir. Volunteering is Just Not Done here, and so there's hesistation.)
Then from the ones sitting, one more to stand up.
(Another stir. Wut is this crazy laowai teacher doing?)
The ones sitting = the Judges. The ones standing are the Opponents. And the ones up in the front each get a slip of paper with a point they have to debate. They have ten (IRL fifteen) minutes to plan, and then ten minutes to debate. GO.
(And then wander among the groups, elucidating, translating, suggesting, explaing, etc.)
And then, after those, the Judges each have to tell who won the debate and why.
All that goes on the board, and then I bring up debating being a game/sport, and remember those things you guys said at the beginning? How are they different now that you've debated? What did you find out? Etc etc. BPD has these eight positions, two teams, one judge, homework is this sheet, see you next class!
And that was it.
I swung by my colleague's door, after. He was keeping his students overtime, and on the board he had his name, personal information (US address, etc), the word "thinking" and the words "having fun". He had the girls in a line along the side of the classroom, and boys sitting in the desks and looking up front. I'd had these students last semester, and the girls who I was used seeing talk - some of my best, most enthusiastic students - had their hands behind their back and were shifting from foot to foot.
So .... am I doing something right?
Is he doing something wrong?
I'm not teaching testing, rule-bound debating. I'm having them learn-by-doing. I want them to talk. I want them to be loud. I want them to feel comfortable enough to be able to be disagree and laugh.
I don't know how the between-my-class-and-his debate on the fifth week will go. I don't know if because of rules and procedures, his will go better. But I know that, both classes, when the students finished their preparation and I gave them a few quick pointers, told them they had ten minutes, and let them at it, they all turned to each other at once, the volume went up, and I saw hands moving in explanation.
That's what I prefer. I want people doing things in my classes. I want them busy, and hopefully enthusiastic.
No great and grand and glorius ending to this post. It's the weekend. I've gone to the market and then spent a couple hours strollign around the internet, looking at news and finding that I can understand (parts of) Chinese Wikipedia. In a bit I will pack my bag, snag a bus down to downtown, and then go to the two-storied beer tent (little iron structures that sell, sure, beer, but also chuanr and noodles and elaborate milk teas), find a table, and sit with a bowl of noodles and study. I've printed out the front page of yesterday's Xinhua, and that should give me enough to work on.
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TO THE BEER TENT
Finally went back to the market this morning. Yesterday, actually, but then today, too. It is very nice to be able to. There was one guy trying to dick me around on prices for 毛蛋 (rambutans), and we wasted five minutes on him changing the price from 30kuai to 35 to 20 to 60, at which point I walked off in a show of irritation.
Been planning and teaching all week, and, as suspected, the classes went better than my stress of the last few posts indicates. I'm doing well! The students are doing well! They are participating in class and everything!
That sounds like a low standard to measure by, maybe, but I am not being facetious: teaching students here is an exercise in "keep them going", and oh man this is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't taught, but: there's a pattern you have to overcome when you teach here - that of sitting, listening, standing and reciting - and overcoming it is what I struggled with last semester. I realized that the classes I enjoyed most were the ones where people were the loudest and most involved. I already knew it but i'll say it again: I don't want to lecture. Their expectance of me lecturing is what I have to invert, and I think I did a good thing when explaining, "my Speaking classes are about fluency, so you guys will have to talk a lot, and about different kinds of things."
And it's true. I'd rather be practical and teach practical stuff than be Srs and teach test-necessary stuff.
(And of course I wonder - is that bad? Tests are, after all, really really big in Chinese society. On the other hand! If they want to go study abroad, or talk to foreigners, or be employued with their English skills, they'll need to know useable things. So ..... I still come down on the side of practicality.)
Let's take Debate as an example. I was told by my colleague (the same one for whom Every Conversation Is A Contest) that it must be British Parliamentary Debate, and got shown all these rules and whatever. We met up before the class, for me to figure out WTH I was even teaching. My colleague was all full of advice. Such as:
"They have to know these rules if they're going to compete."
"Debate is a blood sport."
"It's just two books. They have five weeks."
"I wanna get them out of that wimpy style of talking they have."
"They don't know how to say no. I get up in their faces about that."
"They don't know how to think."
"I always pick on the girls. I tell them 'girls should not have equal access to education in China', and they have to tell me I'm wrong. And in all these classes, only one girl was smart enough to say, 'no, they should have more.'"
"I want them to have fun, because that's important."
...........yes, ladies and gents, this is one of the people I work with.
Some of these things have some basic truths to them, sure (learning how to directly say 'no', having fun, debate is indeed sportish/gamelike). So I pull those out of the dross. (And work really hard to ignore the dross, although there's times I just have to correct him:
- 委婉 might be "wimpy" in his eyes, but it's also courtesy, and it's also more complicated and ingrained than that;
- it's not that they don't know how to think, it's that 1) analytical/critical thought isn't fostered and reinforced from an early age; 2) they don't have safe and reliable outlets to express what they think, and 3) the nail that sticks up gets hammered down;
- reading even one whole book in another language can be HARD GODDAMN WORK, which I know from having such a hard time getting through the Children's book I am still bulling my way through.
- it's not that the girls are less smart (in fact they tend consistantly to have higher grades than the guys (which I blame on 1) having to prove yourself at an engineering school and 2) having to prove yourself among a bunch of men)), it's that they're quieter, because the gender roles here dictate that should be the case. So "picking on the girls" is irritating because they are just as capable, they just need to be allowed/reassured that it's okay to be loud.
Blah blah blah. For the curious, this is how I did it:
I went in, grouped them in 3's, and told them to think aloud (in English!) about the two questions on the board: What Do You Try To Do In Debating, and What Do You Have To Think About [during debating]. Five minutes to think, then put hte answers on the board; leave that aside of a moment, and bring up one from each group.
(This causes a stir. Volunteering is Just Not Done here, and so there's hesistation.)
Then from the ones sitting, one more to stand up.
(Another stir. Wut is this crazy laowai teacher doing?)
The ones sitting = the Judges. The ones standing are the Opponents. And the ones up in the front each get a slip of paper with a point they have to debate. They have ten (IRL fifteen) minutes to plan, and then ten minutes to debate. GO.
(And then wander among the groups, elucidating, translating, suggesting, explaing, etc.)
And then, after those, the Judges each have to tell who won the debate and why.
All that goes on the board, and then I bring up debating being a game/sport, and remember those things you guys said at the beginning? How are they different now that you've debated? What did you find out? Etc etc. BPD has these eight positions, two teams, one judge, homework is this sheet, see you next class!
And that was it.
I swung by my colleague's door, after. He was keeping his students overtime, and on the board he had his name, personal information (US address, etc), the word "thinking" and the words "having fun". He had the girls in a line along the side of the classroom, and boys sitting in the desks and looking up front. I'd had these students last semester, and the girls who I was used seeing talk - some of my best, most enthusiastic students - had their hands behind their back and were shifting from foot to foot.
So .... am I doing something right?
Is he doing something wrong?
I'm not teaching testing, rule-bound debating. I'm having them learn-by-doing. I want them to talk. I want them to be loud. I want them to feel comfortable enough to be able to be disagree and laugh.
I don't know how the between-my-class-and-his debate on the fifth week will go. I don't know if because of rules and procedures, his will go better. But I know that, both classes, when the students finished their preparation and I gave them a few quick pointers, told them they had ten minutes, and let them at it, they all turned to each other at once, the volume went up, and I saw hands moving in explanation.
That's what I prefer. I want people doing things in my classes. I want them busy, and hopefully enthusiastic.
No great and grand and glorius ending to this post. It's the weekend. I've gone to the market and then spent a couple hours strollign around the internet, looking at news and finding that I can understand (parts of) Chinese Wikipedia. In a bit I will pack my bag, snag a bus down to downtown, and then go to the two-storied beer tent (little iron structures that sell, sure, beer, but also chuanr and noodles and elaborate milk teas), find a table, and sit with a bowl of noodles and study. I've printed out the front page of yesterday's Xinhua, and that should give me enough to work on.
TO THE BEER TENT