The real week 1

So despite the initial surprise about the immediate teaching start I think my first week of teaching went well.  In hindsight I’m glad we started immediately, it got any unfounded fear and nerves out of the way; it has also meant I’ve managed to start developing my daily routine pretty quickly – something that’s probably going to prove vital for settling in here.  We had naively hoped that we would get an observation week like most of the other ELAs who are in different schools in the city, however after their week of not doing much at school and then partying in the evenings they got pretty bored pretty quickly (and are now a little bit jealous of us already getting to know our students and being able to regale them with some of our students antics).

This year I’m going to be teaching Senior Grade 2, so the pupils are about 16-17 years old, and equivalent to S5 in Scottish Schools.  My main role here is to get the kids to speak English. They have 6 other English classes every week which mostly focus on being able to read, write and listen to English – but no-one properly emphasises the importance of being able to verbally use all the English that is drilled into them.  This is probably because English speaking is not part of their final year Gao Kao exam. This exam takes place in their final year at school (senior grade 3) and encompasses Maths, Chinese and English (reading, writing and listening), and has to be passed in order to entertain any hopes of going to university here. This means that their whole final year of school is geared towards preparation for this exam - so they don’t get timetabled for frivolous classes like oral English with the foreign teacher! To be honest this arrangement suits me down to the ground because with 19 different classes a week I more than my hands full (the Chinese teachers only teach 2 classes a day).  Each of my classes has between 45-60 pupils in them, which means I’m going to be interacting with a third of the school every week (about 1,200 pupils), that’s a lot of people to say hello to in the corridor!  I think the really difficult thing about teaching that many kids, in classes of that size, is going to be giving them all equal amounts of teacher time – I think I need to clone myself! Maybe some life-size photocopies of myself in the corners of the room would be suitably intimidating enough to get the terrors at the back of some of the classes to be quiet and listen to all the vital things I have to say (because obviously knowing all about Haggis is an important life skill!).

I’m very lucky at my school in respect to the fact that I don’t need to do reports on the kids, or set exams and homework (apparently getting them to do it is a mission for even then Chinese teachers!) I was pretty pleased when I was told I get free reign on the teaching content of all my classes.  They did give me the textbooks that the kids are using in their other English classes to help inspire me when the ideas begin to run dry (which will be inevitable at some point) and get some sort of idea about their current level, but otherwise all the class content is being dreamt up by moi.  To be honest I want to teach the kids things that they might actually use in real life if they are talking English, so things like quantum physics probably won’t pop up in the course content list! Over the week I’ve been making lists of the things the kids say and what their interests are in order to try and plan some lessons that will genuinely be of interest to them.  I’ve also been asking the kids if they have any subjects they want to cover – this question was consistently met with shocked silence at the prospect of even remotely having control over what they learn – I’m sure they will soon warm to the idea and I’ll end up inundated with ideas in the following weeks.

There were a few new and unexpected words I had to teach the kids this week.  I was genuinely surprised that they didn’t know the word ‘siblings’, I honestly just presumed that this word would have featured in the lesson on family that they must have surely had at some point, but none of my 19 classes had heard it before.  I also had to teach one of my classes what the word ‘feet’ meant – thank goodness I had a pair handy.  Standing at the front of a class of 60 students and pointing to one foot and saying “this is a foot” before pointing at them both simultaneously and saying “the plural for two foots is feet” – not something I expected this week.  I think the unexpected is all going to add to the enjoyment and charm of this year.

So for my first week of teaching I decided on a ‘getting to know your new teacher’ lesson. I haven’t had any internet this week to all the facts they had to guess about me were heavily based on the pictures on my laptop - this is what led to Haggis being my favourite western food all week (the only picture of food I had).  It was really interesting getting the students to guess facts about me and then seeing their response to the pictures afterwards.  I was getting them to guess what the name ‘Kintore’ meant, the answers ranged, from my pet dog/cat to my husband, son(!) and best friend – only one person managed to guess it’s my home village. The pictures of home did draw a lot of interest and I managed to drag some discussion out of them about how my home and their differed. I also had a nice picture of the family to show them all – this drew the statement of ‘what a beautiful family you have’ from one pupil and ‘your brother is so handsome’ from another. 

I was surprised how there was a few in each class who said they had brothers and sisters (or siblings) – I genuinely expected everyone to be an only child, yet another example of how wrong my misconceptions of china are! So my attempt at making Haggis sound appealing and highly nutritious were going well until one class know-it-all announced exactly what was made from! I was genuinely surprised that someone had heard of it but she said her personal English teacher had told her about it.  She was also adamant I was from Glasgow - I thought I was going to have to get the birth certificate out! 

I’ve really enjoyed my first week of teaching, even though, by the time class number 6 of the day came around on Wednesday afternoon my voice had definitely been stronger – I think I’m going to have to turn diva and impose a lunchtime speaking ban! It’s been really nice to see how everyone at the school has warmed to us, at the beginning of the week the pupils definitely didn’t know what to make of us, whereas by the end of the week they are running up to us just to say ‘Hello’ – I can see us turning every interaction into an English speaking exercise…

I was also pleasantly surprised when I was accosted on the stairs by one of the Chinese English teachers and asked how to pronounce some words she was teaching in her class – I’m more than happy to help everyone, as long as they return the favour when I start properly learning Mandarin.

G x