Everything I Know About Teaching ESL, Part 1: Know Your Audience

Captive audience via peruisay

Within a week of arriving in China I was teaching my first class, an hourlong "fun" lesson offered as a perk to students already signed up for normal courses. The topic was up to me. I wouldn't know the ability or exact ages of the kids ahead of time (anywhere from six to thirteen, which is a huge spectrum), and I was terrified. Before I came to China I had almost no experience with kids, especially not the Chinese kind; I didn't know how to talk to them, what they were interested in, what they needed to learn. I quick skimmed a few books on teaching theory, making note of different styles of teaching and lesson planning, possible games to play, things to watch for in students. I spent an hour prepping for the class, although one book specifically mentioned such a time investment is a waste of time. I had two full pages of notes and activities suggested by other teachers.

Needless to say, I bombed. The kids were all over the place; one near-fluent eleven year old was sitting next to a six-year-old who couldn't remember his colors. I ran out of my carefully prepared material within the first fifteen minutes before leaving (running out of) the classroom to catch my breath and begging anyone and everyone in the teachers' office- staff, students, desks, the ether- for ideas to fill the rest of the time.

Many of my first classes went this way. Students staring, doodling. Assistants looking at me with "Where did they dig up this fucking foreigner?" looks on their faces. The whispering in Chinese made me paranoid. The stench of boredom followed me from classroom to classroom. I thought I knew what I wanted to teach (English, of course), but I had no idea where to start.

The solution came in a short introduction to teaching written by a colleague: "Problem- Students don't find the class interesting. Solution- Be more interesting."

Hmm. Couple of things.

I've been blogging for a few years at different places, but for some reason I couldn't get the jump to work when I started this thing, so sorry for the long blog is long design. Maybe I'll work on that again some other day, but since no one's actually reading this all I have to say is: piddlewax farthing hopscotch limbo.

Thing the second: this is a personal blog dedicated to the too many things I'm working on, so posts can range from what tea I'm obsessing about to the little fart boy student disrupting my class last Thursday to my pathetic epiphanies about the Chinese language. I've tried to include helpful tags for each post, so if you're interested in further reading on anything I'm writing about (but why should you be?), just click on a tag and voila or something. Along those lines, as much of a grammar and punctuation nazi as I may be, my computer lacks a number pad, so diacriticals are fucking out.

Also, if you'd like to send me a giant wedge of delicious cheese, please email me at gcdonohue@gmail.com and I'll send you my shipping address here in China. I really miss cheese and the selection at the foreigner supermarket is pedestrian and inconsistent at best. We're talking Land'o'lakes on the top shelf here.

Fartsmuggler.

Dirty Tea Towels

I guess Wednesday is as good a day as any to engage in a little self-flagellation and record my progress. Excuses abound for my dismal performance this week.

I've given up on drinking full time and have cut down drastically on my social life, but the quality of my work isn't really something I can sacrifice to accomplish the rest of my goals. Summer teaching started yesterday and I'm still tackling it with tea-fueled fury. I drank four cups of 信阳毛尖 tea before class this morning and unleashed a barrage of devastating Expo English on my unsuspecting second-graders. Oh boy we had fun. Two more hours with them tomorrow, and on top of planning for that lesson I have a Life Club tonight (sort of a "teach whatever to whoever shows up" class). My weekday first-grader class has double for the summer, so I have to write two lesson plans for them a week and I still haven't planned my six classes this weekend. The elephant in the room is the huge pile of ungraded papers (starting from a month or two before I went back to Denver) that I need to burn through with a red pen before my impending parents meetings. Monday I decided I was going to stay in the office and work through lunch on Tuesday. I was hungry on Tuesday so I went home to eat, telling myself I'd get cracking on Wednesday. Today I went to Renato's house and went home for lunch again and I really have no honest idea when all of this is going to get done. Probably Friday, which sucks because it's my only day off and that's when I wanted to get to all of the other stuff I'd been procrastinating.

It's been hot as hell this week, so I haven't lifted or ridden my bike or even done much walking. Just crossing the street turns my head into a sweat hydrant. The lazy fat kid voice inside of me is convinced that there's something fundamentally wrong with working out with the air conditioner on and the human side of me refuses to turn off the air conditioner. It's a nasty little impasse.

I did get to some math on Monday and I spent a lot of yesterday picking up useful Chinese and practicing using my modals, so not all is lost. Tomorrow I do actually need to get ahead on work work so I can spend Friday looking through schools, catching up on some international dev. reading, mathifying (still stuck on that one problem) and drinking borderline unhealthy amounts of tea.

Photo by peruisay

Summer Fun

Today I started teaching a new intensive summer class. Instead of meeting for two hours once a week, we have class for two hours every day. For many teachers the name of the program, "Summer Fun," sounds like gallows humor. Our class load is doubled, we cram six months of classes into six weeks with leaner teaching materials. On top of that, we only have one day off and overtime requirements go up, so we aren't paid more. Last year I had two two hour classes four weekdays a week...with teenagers.

Well, I lucked out this summer. I get 6-11 year olds, and boy are they cute. They're also have a lot more enthusiasm than anyone should have at nine in the morning. Here's Jerry, imported from one of my weekend classes. Sometimes Jerry's so excited to answer English questions that he falls out of his seat.

Before class, one little boy's grandfather had an English map of the Shanghai World Expo splayed across the boy's desk. He was telling everyone and no one in particular that his grandson was there to learn "世博英," or "Expo English." All of the kids are super cute and well-behaved (so far). We talked about the World Expo, played some games and made passports. I have a good feeling about this summer. Maybe it's the ten cups of 信阳毛尖 tea I drank today. Whatever. It's better than adderall. Now I just need to stop making excuses for not working out, but it really is too hot today.

There's a mission statement in here somewhere

Welcome to my blog. Hopefully it's longer lived than the last few I've started and abruptly stopped. One constituted semi-drunken rants about things that pissed me off in China (mostly foreigners). My good friend Renato and I were going to start a blog dedicated to making fun of foreign journalists and their awkward attempts at covering China, but we got stuck on coming up with a good name.

This blog isn't really dedicated to anything specific, which might just give it some legs. I'm going to use it as a way to publicly collect my thoughts and keep track of the projects I've started now that I'm in my second year teaching in China. Among them:

-Researching graduate programs in international development, economics and development economics.

-Reacquainting myself with higher math, specifically what I'll need in an econ grad program.

-Improving my Chinese. I want to become semi-literate (at least reading and typing) and more conversational.

-Working towards a healthy body and healthy mind. Insane amounts of tea and my trusty weight machine are my starting points.

Along the way I'll also be discussing the ups and downs of the newfound more sober me, China, development, teaching, my awesome bike (it's awesome...you'll see), cooking and whatever else crosses my mind. Comments and feedback are way welcome.

Also, anyone interested in ESL teaching in China should check out Renato's awesome blog.