Having Fun All The Time

Well, classes and the semester have started up again, which means that I am again back in front of groups of 50 students at a time, trying to help them figure out the actually pretty difficult language that is English.

Luckily I think I’ve figured out how to teach English a bit better this semester, so the stress level involved with preparing for and teaching classes seems to be way lower now. Part of that has to do with simplifying and streamlining what I’m teaching and how I’m teaching it, and part of it also has to do with the fact that this semester I just have fewer students.

Part of “simplifying and streamlining” the teaching process, for me, I think, meant just making it more boring (for me, not for the students, I hope). In my first semester I think I spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to create new lesson plans and different ways of teaching. I went all over the place with my lesson plans and activities, trying everything I could think of or find on the internet. In a way, I think that was good because I tried a lot of different things and learned about what works and what doesn’t work in the classroom. Then again, I also spent a lot of time in-class explaining my new lesson plans to students. I mean a LOT of time. Which I don’t think is a very productive way for them to practice their spoken English. Which was supposed to be what the class was about.

(Just to record it here, some of the things I tried in class included: call-and-response scripts, writing dialogues and performing them, handing out slips of paper with questions on them and timing the students and asking them to ask and answer them in pairs, giving the class disicussion questions and tearing my hair out while the whole class proceeded to sit around and chat in Chinese and play with their cell phones, lecturing on the present perfect and present continuous and past perfect tenses and trying in vain to get the students to practice them, trying to teach them songs and having them tell me that the songs were too fast and too hard to sing, and on top of that not being able to sing the songs myself, attempting to get the students to practice basic conversation by teaching them simple phrases like “how ya doin’?” and “how’s it goin’?” and then realizing that the students already knew these phrases but still couldn’t use them in basic conversation, for reasons unknown, trying to teach the students pronounciation of vowels and then realizing that they had already learned the vowels but pronounced them strangely for reasons that I couldn’t determine at all, and only determined by accident, usually, months later, & etc, &etc. Most of these lessons were relatively painful and stressful, because the students didn’t understand them and I was trying them cold for the first time. & etc.)

So this semester I have significantly pared down what I am trying to do with the hope that if I can simplify things a lot, and focus on helping the students practice a few key skills, like taking basic English sentence structures and creating new sentences creatively, and like retelling stories from our readings using creative twists of the tales — I’m hoping by doing this stuff we’ll be able to make real progress. I’m also using audio recorders this semester to record the students’ speech and play it back to them with critiques of their pronounciation and suggestions recorded by me. So I’m hoping that will help. There’s evidence that it will. When I logged into QQ (China’s MSN-like chat client) the other day, one of my students messaged me and told me that she liked the new class structure — and also that last semester she hadn’t understood my classes, so mostly she had just read the book in class. This is the kind of thing that happens in classrooms here often, I think. They’re so big and so unwieldy, and teachers tend to lecture nonstop with little knowledge of what is going on out among the ranks, that if students don’t like a class, or don’t feel that there’s anything to learn from it, they sleep, or read, or play on their phones. Which I guess isn’t different from the U.S. at all.

More on teaching later. For now I’ve got to run back to my dorm because someone is helping me to fix my internet today (I hope). Hurrah. That means HFATT should come back to life shortly.

Oh, and here’s an awesome first-time kind of basic guide to teaching oral English in China. When I stumbled across it, it was a revelation:

http://www.sinosplice.com/learn-chinese/guide-to-teaching-in-china

See you next time.

: )