Having Fun All The Time

Today I taught 140 ten-year-olds English at the same time. I was asked to do this about 4 weeks ago by a superintendant of a local primary school while I was deeply inebriated at 6:30 in the evening (heavy drinking is par for the course when dining on a professional basis here; my liaison and I were doing some partying on the company, so drinking vast quantities of beer was mandatory). But even then, when he asked me, I didn’t say yes. What I said was: “I will definitely consider it.”

It turns out, as I learned weeks later, that this phrase in Chinese actually means “yes, no problem”.

So last night at about 5:30 p.m. I started planning for my first primary school class.

Based on my university class teaching experience, I knew approximately nothing about teaching primary school. So I went with safe, easy stuff. I decided to try to just play “Simon Says” with them and then teach the words from the chapter in the book via Powerpoint-slideshow, and then to teach them to sing a song (knowing how to play guitar is incredibly valuable in situations like this, because you can just pull out the guitar and everybody is happy; you’re not just some English-speaking stroke at the front of a classroom who wants everybody to sing some off-tune song with limited vocabulary). I finished my Powerpoint at about 10 p.m. and then turned out the lights and went to bed.

The next morning a teacher from the school picked me up at 8:30 and told me that the class I would teach would be about 150 students, which is 100 more than I expected.

We went to the school and did the normal Chinese introductions, sitting in an office and drinking tea and smoking cigarettes (which, interestingly, I learned that smoking indoors will be banned nationwide as of Jan. 1 next year…which to me seems like going to New Orleans and telling everyone that drinking is not allowed anymore after next week) and then I went to class. And there they were, all 140 of them.

The room was about the size of an ordinary classroom, with a big counter at the front of the room and a chalkboard and a computer with digital projector. The students were lined up in front with mini-chairs, 12 to a row, packed together in a way that would make a fire-code inspector shudder. I realized that playing Simon Says with all 140 of them would lead to inevitable injury and possible trampling, so I just asked the first three rows to play.

Explaining the game was a little tricky and I got hung up on explaining that when I didn’t say Simon Says they were supposed to not move at all, and just say “You didn’t say Simon Says”…after about 10 minutes of trying the game we got to the point where they did both (clapped their hands and said “You didn’t say Simon Says”). Luckily one of the Chinese teachers understood my meaning and chimed in to help me explain the game, but they still didn’t quite get it. So I played it for another five minutes with them and then moved on.

After that I taught for another 30-ish minutes with I think at least the bare minimum of efficacy. Using basic Chinese phrases like “read after me” and stuff like that was enough to manage the class, pretty much. We practiced the words and made some sentences, and then sang “She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes”. By the second verse they were pretty fidgety, and I was totally sure that the school’s teachers had warned them to be super well behaved for my class, so I decided that was all I had for them and let them go.

The funny thing was, after class was over the students decided they wanted my autograph and I was suddenly surrounded by a mob of cute 10-year-olds thrusting little cartoon-decorated pads of paper and pens at me. Which, even though it was completely ridiculous, you can’t say no when kids ask for your autograph, so I scribbled my English name in maybe 50 notebooks and then one of the teachers dragged me out of the room.

We hung out for a while longer and then, as is the custom when getting together with folks on a professional basis here, went out for a big elaborate meal and some midday drinking.

I definitely felt relieved that the class was over (I had been pretty nervous about it when planning the prior evening), but then I also know that primary school teachers here face the pressure of teaching and managing huge classes of occasionally unruly children nonstop here.

Classes are rarely smaller than 50 students, can be as big as 60 or 70 even in primary school, and the children are (as all children are everywhere) loud and occasionally misbehaved and difficult to control (although they are much more obedient than American children; I commented to one of the teachers that if you crammed 140 U.S. kids in a classroom for one hour, the school would quickly be reduced to cinders).

Primary school teachers simply do not have it easy, and the material they have to teach is not simple. Even in the fourth-grade English book I was teaching from, the students were already past just conjugating verbs and into making complete sentences, learning intermediate vocabulary like “dragon kite” & etc. After 6 months of Chinese study there were still some sentences that I could not translate from English to Chinese without a dictionary.

So at lunch I looked around at the other primary school teachers sitting with us and when they complimented me and said “You are so hard working — you must be tired” I definitely had to answer….no way. (Although, honestly, they would have said this to me even if I had showed up to the class in my pajamas and just read aloud from an English newspaper to the students*.)

After lunch I went to a colleague’s home for tea before returning to the college in the afternoon, and we got to talking about the education system in China, which is something that everybody seems interested in here, especially vis a vis the U.S. education system.

I think most people in the U.S. are aware of how hard the Chinese education system drives its students. The stereotype is that Chinese kids are wizards at math and science and study approximately 90 hours a day. But it’s tough to get a real feel for how hard the kids are really working. We also know that a lot of U.S. students are totally overloaded with extracurriculars and exhausted all the time in America in the race to get into top universities.

But, I think, here, the pressure is definitely greater. From grade 1, students’ whole existences are basically centered around the Gaokao, which is the college entrance examination in China that determines whether and where students go to college. At present, I still know little about the actual content of the Gaokao, but I do know that it is super hard and that it is singularly important in determining a student’s chances for college admission. From what everyone says, it is basically the only thing that matters. Which means that from a very young age Chinese students are basically bred to be test-taking machines, containers for information, 10-hour-a-day studying animals.

To someone with a progressive educational background from the U.S. it is totally obvious that that kind of educational system and college admissions process is fraught with all kinds of terrible dangers and inadequacies, mostly having to do with the inadequacy of testing in determining students’ potential for success in life and the dearth of critical thinking skills that a rote-learning curriculum results in. But those are platitudes. And the Chinese people in my university, including the students and especially the young teachers, all are very aware of the issue and aware that the students are overworked and aren’t getting what they need. But as far as fixing the problem goes, there seem to be few answers and a lot of people who are afraid of letting go of the old rules/old system.

As little as I know about the subject now, I think it will become more and more important as time goes on. People here, especially because of the limited number of offspring they’re allowed to have, care a LOT about their kids’ educations and futures. And as they understand more and more (as we’re still struggling to understand and accept in the U.S.) that testing does almost nothing in terms of guaging a student’s chances of success, stuff has gotta change around here. Or at least, based on the number of people who keep asking me what the education system in the U.S. is like (this is the #1 question I get asked by students and teachers), I think it will.

A couple of other interesting notes from conversations/reading:

The only “private schools” in China are actually schools for people who are not registered to go to public schools; so, whereas in the U.S. we generally take pride in going to private school and pay a lot of money to do so and expect a better education from them, here the private schools are considered the shoddier option across-the-board.

Plagiarism is much more common (or has been in the recent past) in school systems at every level here, from middle school through university. In the lower-level grades (that I have taught, i.e. in my experience) it seems to be a symptom of the rote-learning atmosphere — it’s not the process of discovering knowledge that’s important, but the acquisition of the correct answer, so what’s the harm of looking up the best answer and copying it word-for-word? — whereas in the higher echelons of academia it can be simply a matter of finding research published in another language and translating it and putting one’s name on it…which, again, could be a symptom of the rote-learning environment.

That said, the level of material that is covered in Chinese classroom simply annihilates the material covered in U.S. schools. I don’t know the statistics and specifics, but I can say that these kids are learning math, science, and language concepts at a very young age that we wouldn’t even dream of teaching the same-aged kids in the U.S. It’s very advanced and very hard, and it leaves no doubt that some very smart people come out of the education system here.

That’s all for today.

: )

*I have actually tested the penchant of people for complimenting me even when there is no logical basis for doing so…case in point: in the afternoons I usually go running on the college’s track. Usually I run a decent amount, and look extremely sweaty and exhausted at the end of my run. Often students ask me how many laps I ran, and after I tell them 6, or 8, or whatever it is, they invariably say “Wow, you are very strong”; but on some occasions I have lied and said 1 or 2, and their reply remains exactly the same.