Early Impressions: Part I The Teaching

(Originally written November, 2016)

As an English as a Foreign Language Teacher (Or English as a Secondary Language Teacher to people who trained themselves in a different online course to TEFL) one of the most time-consuming parts of my life in China is the teaching. I have a part-time contract which affords me a lot of movie watching, novel writing and bumming about the flat time but in addition to my seven two-hour classes per week there is the energy that goes into marking, planning lessons, assembling slide-shows and agonizing with nerves over the minutia of communicating with people who have been taught English primarily by memorizing Shakespeare plays (accuracy of this piece of wisdom from the TEFL course may vary from student to student.)

My main responsibility in the Qiannan Normal College is a big one, I am the English Listening teacher of all 200-odd English major freshmen. I also teach half of them Extensive Reading. For seven weeks now I’ve been stumbling along amicably, though I hope not incompetently, I can see that I have come a long way. My first class was a nightmare, a turn up to school in your underwear, a singing a song at the end of About a Boy nightmare but really I can’t see how it could have gone any other way.

I came to China, with flatmate Callum, through a private company affiliated with the CEAIE called The China Teaching Experience. The flat fee at the start of the emigration process covered one-to-one support with the CEO Andrew, help navigating our way around the expensive and often unpredictable Chinese emigration process and TEFL training. The training was made up of two parts. First an online course consisting of eight modules and a tick-the box test which mostly assumed I would be staying in a different part of China and mostly assumed I would be teaching high school or primary school students. The second component was supposed to be two weeks of practical in-class training, observing teachers and getting experience placing ourselves in charge of class rooms. I spent those two weeks playing Lego Marvel Superheroes on the X-Box 360 and teaching myself how to make steak pie (badly.) I waited and waited for an update that wasn’t coming about my Chinese visa.

In the English Department the university is lucky enough to have eight foreigners teaching. Callum and I from The CTE; Lettice and Aimee from The British Council, Sam and Ethan from the Peace Corps and a married couple named Cliff and Rebekah from Georgia who have lived in Duyun for four years now and studied Chinese at the university before taking on teaching positions. Aimee had the experience of taking a practical training course called CELTA before applying through the British Council and Lettice has traveled the world and is naturally self-assured as a teacher should be. Cliff and Rebekah know the culture, the customs and the language. Ethan and Sam, most impressively of all were given a three-month training session in Chengdu with time in class and Mandarin training. Callum and I have our online, multiple-choice-examined course.

I don’t want to dwell on my first lesson. It certainly taught me that it is impossible to adequately prepare for something when you don’t know what needs preparing. On that first day I ran about twenty minutes short of the hour and forty minutes that I was supposed to fill. The first ten minutes were consumed with my failing to operate the computer and power-point (turned off at the wall) and the last with my belligerently uncommunicative students not asking me questions when I had clearly written in my lesson plan “Students will ask questions about me and life in Scotland.” I even forgot to take the register.

Following that awful first lesson I sat, shell shocked in the Foreign English Teachers’ office staring into the middle distance. Aimee and Ethan were about to begin their Oral lesson which included a similar personal introduction section to mine. How did it go? asked Aimee and with the horrified aura of a trauma survivor I replied They don’t talk, they never talk. And the lesson! It was 20 minutes short because they just don’t talk! Luckily this was enough warning for her to begin thinking about some additional games and exercises to fill the time if her lesson ran short too.

I was able to talk to a number of my co-workers over the course of that afternoon and they each had some well-chosen words of comfort. You’ll have a horrible first week Sam assured me, You just will. They’re not used to foreigners and since most of them are girls they won’t be used to the fact that you’re a man either. Certainly this is true, my students come mostly from rural backgrounds and apparently most rural parents in this part of the world have stricter control over their progeny than we are used to. Hence the discovery of B. O. Y. S. doesn’t come until they move away from the constraints of home to arrive in university. It’s like middle-school here, I remember Ethan telling us. Comfortingly enough he also later told me that my first class, class Number 4, are exceptionally shy and that even with a year’s teaching experience under his belt he had difficulty getting them to talk.

Shyness is not the only reason that a class might refuse to answer you. They’re all about getting things right, Cliff told me. In class, all throughout their education they’ve been told by their teachers that this is something they need to learn and this is right and this is wrong, they’re terrified of being wrong. What’s more there is a high chance that your students simply do not understand you. Exceptional readers and proficient writers as they are, these students are the result of a system wherein vocabulary is memorized and shouted back and forth. Memorizing Shakespeare’s plays is considered to be the best way to learn English because, after all is Shakespeare not the master of the English language? (Again, this fact was brought up in the TEFL course and I’ve found many of its nuggets of wisdom to be lacking in the authenticity department.) For these reasons I came to forgive myself for my atrocious first class (though I would understand if my students have not) and I came to see that my co-workers really are the best resource available.

The classes have calmed down in my company as they’ve gotten more used to me and their work has noticeably improved over the course of these seven weeks. I also think that they have become more attuned to my accent which is more or less the only thing I have to offer over a fully qualified teacher. That said, the moment I realised that I was probably going to be OK over here for my year abroad was when I sat down in front of my second listening class and a voiced called out You are really handsome!

Why yes I am, and we’re going to get along just fine. We have, too. Class 03 are brilliant. I suspect the cat-caller, was King, a shameless and enthusiastic student. Back then she was just a voice in a crowd.

I learned quickly to adapt my classes, living in adamant fear of one of my classes running short again and the agonizing embarrassment that that entails. By my third listening class I was using all of the tricks that my co-workers had told me about. To my introductory lecture about myself I had added two slides, one for each of my sisters. It will be the easiest class you teach Ethan imparted They just like looking at pictures of white people, we fascinate them. Elder sister Lucy, my students now know is a fencing instructor. She likes physical activity and (controversially enough) spending time with her friends. Annie is another wacky character who likes reading books and going hiking. She is studying to be an architect. 

They’re shy so they won’t like talking about themselves Sam had told me Get them to work in pairs and then ask them to introduce each other. Strangely enough, the three students that I asked to introduce their partners refused and talked about themselves instead. They keep you on your toes.

Despite shameless filibustering and excessive slow talking my third class also had a baggy ten minutes before the break so I followed Amy’s advice Games, play lots of games. They love Pictionary. So Pictionary we played. I went to the whiteboard and, knowing how exciting they found kilts I etched a hairy highlander on the whiteboard and drew an arrow pointing at his sporran. The class roared with laughter and silence fell. So, what is it? I asked. A girl nodded, yeah she knew It’s, I forgot the word. It’s the skirt. Fair enough, I wrote the word kilt on the whiteboard. Who is next? I asked, there was some twitching and some murmuring. I rephrased Who would like to draw something on the board for us next? One girl, clearly the resident artist (I now know her well as Judy) was elected to participate by the gazes of her peers. Giggling she drew a little bespectacled man with a quiff and a tartan kilt. Stephen in a kilt, it wasn’t quite the leap of imagination that I had been hoping for but at least we all got to laugh warmly together at the notion of teacher wearing a skirt.

The girls can be utterly shameless in their collective catcalling in direct contrast to their manner when asked a question individually before the class. They have established a curious mythology around myself and the Peace Corps boys to the point where we barely recognize their descriptions of us. I think in their minds there’s no difference between Sam, Ethan and Stephen and One Direction or George Harrison, Paul McCartney and John Lennon (I guess that makes Callum Ringo.) They have their little sayings about all of us as though concocted simultaneously through a Hive mind. So Tall, So Handsome! They say of me, Stephen You Are Cute, So Tall So Handsome. Apparently this chant is an inherited one as Ethan was once So Tall, So Handsome. Now that he has grown his hair and beard he is So Handsome, An Artist! The students insist against all contradiction from him that he is An Artist whether or not he has skills with a paintbrush or guitar. Sam, much to his bewilderment is So Shy, So Handsome. I don’t get it, he told me I just talk to them normally like Ethan does but they insist I’m shy! Still, If I could be known as shy and handsome; a handsome artist or tall and handsome the latter isn’t a bad one to be. It plays havoc on the ego.