Teacher Alison

One of the nice things about teaching in the Summer Teaching Program last month is that I was observed by several different experienced teachers.  In addition to giving me feedback and suggestions about my teaching, they also did me the favor of taking some pictures of my classes.  It's the most I've ever seen myself in action as a teacher, so I thought I'd give you a peek.

Here's a Christmas lesson for a special holiday culture afternoon.  You can see on the board that I'm trying to help them differentiate Santa and Jesus, who occasionally get mixed up in the minds of those who only have a vague understanding of the origins of Christmas.

Here are a few shots from my own classroom this summer.  I love those moments when the class is engrossed in an activity and actually speaking all English. 

I have always had an interest in teaching and have loved it ever since first getting my feet wet as a teaching assistant at the University of Iowa.   I know that God has gifted me with a knack for teaching and hope that I can keep using that gift throughout my life.

Let me close with a couple all-time favorite teaching photos, taken by my friend Gloria when she visited me in Rizhao.

The Easter bunny and hang gliding, respectively.

Classy

What do you do when you've had about two cups of tea too many and you're wide awake in the middle of a Thursday night?

I thought I'd take this chance to see if the Internet would be speedy enough to upload some photos from this week of teaching. 

Each Tuesday afternoon we have three classes give short presentations about Chinese culture.  This a nice way to promote cultural exchange, since the foreign teach about American culture several times a week.  Here are a couple photos:

One of the teachers presenting on Hui culture, with Ningxia highlighted on the map behind

Two of the ladies in my class invited my teammate to come up and try his hand at making a Beijing Duck Roll-up

Here are some other scenes from teaching this week:

My class in the middle of an activity on Task-Based Language Teaching

We had a movie showing (Akeelah and the Bee) and my student brought her sweet baby boy

We had another English corner in the square last night.  Here my teammate Meggi is attracting a crowd with her guitar.

Today during break we took a class picture.

With a girl from my class

With all the ladies in my class

Slogging through a vocabulary activity

I've been having a great teaching experience so far, although it seems like there's a lot less energy in the classroom than when I was teaching classes of forty college students.  For example, all it took to delight my college classes was for me to tell a stupid joke.  Here, I can sing and dance (which would have killed with my college student crowd) and get nothing but some polite smiles.

It's also different for me to teach adults, who have many concerns and responsibilities outside this training program.  They are absent a lot more often and sometimes seem distracted or tired, especially now that Ramadan has started.

Nonetheless, we are all warming up to each other and they've been nothing but friendly and patient with me.  Today they were all proud because they did some relay races in another foreign teachers' culture lesson and beat the other classes every time.  I spent this evening in the home of one of the locals from my class, which was a great experience.  I'm hoping for some more good memories in this last week of teaching.

Welcome to the Foreign Monkey Show!

We ex-pats working in China have a little phrase to describe our function in this society: "foreign monkeys."  Many times we are wanted not necessarily for our sweet skillz or our awesome personlitiez but just because we look foreign.

The work of a foreign monkey is not difficult.  It includes things like this:

• posing for photographs
• attending functions with important people
• allowing our names to be dropped
• attending English corners
• helping schools and businesses with PR (by appearing in their ads or making personal appearances)
• talking to reluctant little kids whose mothers push them forward to say hello
• dancing and singing on command

Now I'm in a place where (I think) no foreigners live and few foreigners visit.  They want to take full advantage of having us here, which means we were asked to come to two community English corners and also to spend an evening teaching a class at the high school. 

Here's my report.  Welcome to the foreign monkey show!

English Corner
English corners are everywhere in China.  They are supposed to be times for people to come practice English.  Our leaders organized an English corner on Wednesday in the town square and asked us to come.

Picture ten giant magnets walking into a crowd of iron filaments.  That about sums up our English corner experience.

Teammate Larry fielding questions

Teammate Cara bonding with middle school students

One of the girls in my class and her cute baby.  We were happy some of our own students came in addition to the crowds of locals.

At the High School
We were asked to each teach an hour-long class to high school seniors.  My teammate and I decided to introduce ourselves, teach a few songs ("Hokey Pokey" and "Row Row Row Your Boat"), and then have them try to write English songs.

I was astounded to see that there are 90 students in the class.

They are high school seniors, which means it's less than a year until they take the college entrance exam.  They will not learn any new material this year.  The whole year is devoted to reviewing what they've learned and taking practice tests.  You can see from the piles of books on their desks how much information they have to study.

The college entrance exam is also the reason these poor kids are going to school all summer long, day and night.  This is true throughout China.  Your whole first twelve years of education are devoted almost exclusively to preparing you for the two-day exam that determines your future.  If you don't do well, you have to wait another year to take it again.  This leads to a lot of super-seniors in high school.

Anyway, I had a great time teaching the students.  They haven't had foreign teachers before so they literally applauded everything I did.  They also caught onto the songs really quickly and even managed to sing a round.  Not bad!  Some students were videoing me on their cell phones for the entire hour.

Clapping to get their attention

Most of the 90 students

The rest of the students.  Couldn't get them all in one photo!

Welcome to Haiyuan, Welcome to my Classroom

Here is a photo-only post of my four days (so far) here in Haiyuan.

Sunday: Seeing our classrooms for the first time. Normally 80 middle-schoolers learn in here.

Opening ceremony

Opening ceremony

A couple of my students.  I have just 13 students!  The man on the right has been teaching almost 15 years.

More students.  These girls are about my age.

This is my student with the most experience - 17 years of teaching.

Watermelons are said to be very good here.

City street

The intersection we walk through every day on our way to school

Playing cards

The hotel where we live

Moebius* Picnic

Today I was busy all day.  Strangely, I did almost everything twice.

When I woke up, I had less than an hour to catch a cab to the grocery store and back so I'd be ready for my afternoon class picnic. 

I rushed into the store and put 6 loaves of bread in my basket.  The bread lady helped me get 20 buns.  The meat lady helped me get 6 chicken breasts.  I grabbed a few other things, paid, and got a cab home.

Then, with only 15 minutes to spare before my Chinese class, I got on my bike and headed to Shandong Foreign Languages School for my 2-hour class.

Back at home, I hurried to make a big batch of chicken salad and get the apartment ready for the 33 students who would soon arrive to make American sandwiches. 

Chicken salad sandwich table

Peanut butter and jelly table

Then, like a cloud of locusts, they came.  Everyone did a good job following directions and we had sandwiches for everyone in less than 20 minutes.

We found a place to set up our picnic.

 
Allen, the monitor, came over and asked me if we should play some games after the students finished eating.  Chinese students like to have large group activities at parties, so I wasn't surprised that he had planned a few group games.

So after the sandwiches and snacks were gone, he stood up and gathered the class into one big circle.  Then he said, "Alison, would you like to explain the rules of the game?"

"Explain the rules?  I don't know the rules.  I don't even know the game."

"What?  You didn't prepare some games?"

Haha!  It was such a classic misunderstanding.  Allen never imagined that I would have planned a picnic without planning games, and I never imagined that I was supposed to.  I quickly thought of a couple games, which we played for a few minutes, and then I unleashed them with a few Frisbees I had brought.

It was really fun.

After the picnic, I went to our English library to chat with students.

Then, I had less than an hour to catch a cab to the grocery store and back so I'd be ready for my class picnic at noon tomorrow. 

I rushed into the store and put 7 loaves of bread in my basket.  The same bread lady saw me coming and gestured to the buns.  "20?" she asked.  "Yes!"  I said, and she nicely threw in two extra bread snacks for the crazy repeat customer.  The same meat lady helped me get 6 chicken breasts.  I grabbed a few other things, paid, and got a cab home.  I even had a female cabbie, just like I had this morning.  The whole shopping trip was on repeat.

Then, running late for my friend's birthday party, I got on my bike and headed to Shandong Foreign Languages School, the same university I went to for my Chinese lesson this morning.

Back at home, I will hurry tomorrow morning to make a big batch of chicken salad and get the apartment ready for the 40 students who will arrive at 10:00 to make American sandwiches. 

Nearly identical shopping trip goods, ready for a nearly identical picnic tomorrow

*I was first introduced to the concept of a Moebius strip in a piece of Improv Everywhere performance art.  Apparently in mathematics, a Moebius strip is when you take a rectangle (like a piece of paper), twist it halfway, and then attach the ends to create a loop with a twist.


The same concept applied to time gives you a loop of time which keeps repeating, described like this:

“There is the theory of the moebius. A twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop, from which there is no escape. When we reach that point, whatever happened will happen again.”
-Lieutenant Commander Worf, Star Trek: TNG, “Time Squared”

So in the Improv Everywhere moebius loop, several undercover artists go to a Starbucks repeat the same 5-minute sequence of events twelve times, thus confusing and amazing the other patrons.


I had a great day, but I'm glad my moebius only repeated once.