Not such a strong start

So this week’s teaching didn’t start out so well.  When I was planning my lesson I seemed to forget that I am teaching High School children who don’t have a choice but to come to class and not adults doing a degree in advanced English – I was far too ambitious!  It all started so well when the pupils clapped when I walked into the room; obviously last week’s lesson had left a good impression…this week’s probably not so much.  I’m definitely going to have to fight to fix the fun reputation that oral English classes have.  In a bid not to treat my students like idiots - and try and push them a little bit to use more English - I massively overshot the mark, to the point where I was running out of English words they understood to try to explain what I meant.  Not the best way to start back after the long weekend.  So by lesson number 3 the lesson had changed tact dramatically, and definitely for the better – by the time I’ve created some examples of what I want them to do we will be cooking on gas.

One thing that has struck me about Chinese pupils is that they don’t seem to understand the concept of using their imagination and dreaming things up. This was something I thought they would be dying to do after their full days of strict lessons and studying - clearly I was wrong.  Maybe it’s a lost in translation thing, but when I was at school if we were told to dream up something crazy we would take the task and run wild with it.  Here they just re-produce what they already know, whether that be an invention that already exists e.g. iphone or regurgitating their school timetable instead of dreaming up their ideal, perfect one (like i’m going to try and get them to do this week)…

Time will tell if I can corrupt the imaginations of Chinese school children or not.

G x