"The Money Is In Your Pocket"

What can I say? I had a relatively good day at work yesterday.

Even though it was an early day, I had to meet Chris and Susan at the Xinzhuang metro stop by 7:45am, the day was ... good.

The high school class we were demonstrating in was half and half. The first class was a disaster since they wanted to keep it with 30+ students in addition to the small crowd of other English teachers observing, “just what the Western style of teaching was.” Chris and I tried to implement small group sizes but with the way everything was set up, it was just not going to work. We went around doing small group introductions and tried getting the students to open their mouths and speak. But the sentences they said were very rehearsed and by the book. The bigger disaster happened when I asked the students to pull out one of the books and they said they didn’t have it. What. An. Unfortunate. Thing.

The regular teacher quickly came over to help me work out what was the problem. And I told Chris to “entertain” the crowd as a couple of us tried to solve the problem. Switched up the lesson plan to using something that was already copied out of the (other) book. Needless to say, I felt like it was a disaster because of the slow-paceness and just boringness of the lesson. The other teachers observing the lesson asked us why they would need a foreign teacher to do something that a regular Chinese teacher could already do. What was the point of having us there?

The second class they wanted us to demonstrate a more “Western” style of teaching. We had the large class divided up into 2 smaller classes of about 15 students each. Chris took one class and I took the other. I felt sorry for Chris because SES had told him that he would just be helping me out and not teaching a whole class by himself, so he was basically thrust onto the stage against his knowledge.

To get the students to open up more and to talk more (a silent class is so boring as I know from past AAP tutoring experience), I had the students move away from their desks/computers and come closer to the center. Started with introductions to give each student a chance to talk and then I started on the presentation of the lesson, “greetings and goodbyes.” Yawn. I asked two students to come up to demonstrate a simple dialogue and from there it spiraled off to a wonderful tangent. I had each student come up in groups and asked the audience to give characters and scenarios. I could tell that the high schoolers were enjoying this because they were able to use their creativity and use more spontaneous English. This was a move away from doing things by the book and responding with a rehearsed sentence.

Every once in awhile I would sneak a peek at the observers in the back and I saw that even they were having fun! Here, the students were working on their English and having a fun time doing so. Even though the vocabulary was limited, I could tell the students were searching in their brains for similar words that could convey the meaning they wanted. A particularly funny one involved 3 boys who were given the roles of mother, father and baby arguing in a restaurant. The “baby” could speak English apparently.

Mother: I want to eat much food. I want to eat sandwich, hamburger, steak. I want to eat all the expensive food.
Father: You want to eat too much. I don’t have money.
Mother: Yes you do.
Father: No I don’t.
Mother: The money is in your pocket.
Father: No money in my pocket.
Baby: Mother! This is a bad father. Father has no money.
Mother: I leave now.
Baby: Mother! I go with you.
Father: Wait for me. I come with you.

There was also a hunter shooting down a singing bird, a robber robbing a rich old lady with the interference of a policewoman (the robber refused to go to jail because her father was sick), two strangers going to eat dinner, and a famous singer (me) charging her #1 fan 10RMB to receive an autograph.

I later found out that day that the high school classes are canceled until further notice. The overall impression I got at the meeting after class was over (whether the HS would hire a SES teacher) was that they wished I looked more “foreign” and want a guarantee that their students will be able to pass the listening portion of the Shanghai English Exam.

Later that day, I went to my usual school, ZFH, to teach the 3rd graders. They are probably my favorite group so far. They remembered my name and some of them even kissed my cheeks during introductions. That was too cute. And they are also at that age where whatever (lame) game you give them to play, they love it. Even when there are no winners and losers. We played a game where all they had to do was run around a chair to look at a flashcard, sit down and raise their hand to be called on to answer “what color is it?” Even when someone else answered the question, they got very excited because they had the same answer and it was validation enough that they had also “won.” And they are old enough to give me some feedback even if it is in Mandarin (which I pretend to not understand) or miming. Not to mention that they have a lot of energy and love to run back and forth.