First Week of Teaching

My experiences with teaching English in China have always been a mixed bag of experiences, but have always been very enjoyable.  Last time I was in China I had the opportunity to teach some college students at Southwest University and with junior high school students in a small rural town called Shehong in Sichuan province.  Teaching English in Sichuan was my most memorable teaching experience in China.  We were not given any kind of teachers training when we arrived to the school.  We were given a text book and were instructed to teach one lesson per forty minute period (we taught nine periods total in one weekend stay).  I had never taught a class in my life and after looking at the lessons, I figured it was only going to take maybe ten minutes to teach each lesson.  Somehow I had to figure out how to use up the remaining thirty minutes of class while being under the pressure of having to teach a class of 40 students.  I ended up having the students play games and have competitions in front of the class to test their knowledge of the material.  I also remember a photographer constantly taking pictures of me the other CSBSJU students while we taught the English lessons.  I kind of chuckle at the idea that maybe there is a billboard somewhere in Sichuan with my picture on it that advertises English learning opportunities at that particular school.  I cherish my teaching experience in Sichuan and little did I know that I would be experiencing a very similar situation two years later at Southwest University.

I just finished my first week of teaching at Southwest University.  Let’s just say it was a big learning experience for me.  When I first got here I was expecting to go through some sort of teaching orientation (because we teach graduate level classes) to allow me to get an idea of how to teach.  Unfortunately we didn’t.  If you have a bachelor’s degree from an English speaking country, you automatically are an expert at teaching English.  All I did was introductions for all of the eight classes that I taught.  As much as I hated doing cheesy introduction games I started each class off with a guessing game.  I started by briefly introducing myself and welcoming the students to their Conversational English class.  Then I wrote ten statements about myself on the board.  I would write five true statements and five false statements on the board.  To add a little humor to my introduction some of the false statements were as ridiculous as “I have been to the moon”, or “I am thirty years of age”.  Then I had the class try to figure out which statements were true and false.  After that I had the students do the “two truths and a lie” exercise one at a time in front of the class so that they could introduce themselves to me and the rest of the class.  Of course I wouldn’t make the whole class introduce themselves partly for my sanity and for the class’s as well (the class size ranges from 35-65 students).  After the forty minutes we get a ten minute break before we start a second forty minute period.  I would use the second period to allow students to ask me questions about anything they wanted to know or to just start up conversation.  Now teaching did not always go so smoothly.  I could go into every classroom with some sort of plan and still have to change it and modify it.  It was very stressful when a class was not as talkative as the others or was not as skilled in speaking English as the others.  But, in the end everything still seemed to work out just fine and the students seemed very excited about the class.  We shall see how the next couple of weeks go.