Teaching!

I just survived my first week of teaching! I am only teaching for about an hour a day, but it's still absolutely exhausting, especially as we have to observe other teachers in the morning, take Chinese, pedagogy, and leadership classes in the afternoon, and still have to plan lessons in the evening! But it was also a lot of fun. Here are some highlights from the week.

The first day all three teachers (math/science, humanities, and English) taught class together. This meant, of course, that it was mostly in Chinese. I made sure, however, that when the students introduced themselves they also said "My name is _______ ." and one English sentence, any English sentence. Some said their whole introductions in English as well. Several of them like to play chess, several of them like to sing, and two of the boys like to eat hamburgers. Most of them told me at least that they "have a happy family". One of the shyer girls couldn't think of anything to say, stood uncomfortably for a few moments trying to come up with something, and then simply blurted out "Good luck!"

The agenda for the first day.
I need to work on writing on the board.

The humanities teacher and I had an interesting disagreement about the class rules when we were preparing for class. I thought that "respect the class" should be the most important rule, since all the others actually stem from it, so I asked if it could be either first or last. She thought, however, that it was important that they sort of go in chronological order: beginning, during, and after class.

The class rules.

On Tuesday I gave a diagnostic test. The scores ranged from 38% to 92%. I'm still working on figuring out how to teach such a wide range of student abilities (and probably will continue to have to work on this for the next two years).

Wednesday was my first real day of teaching. On Tuesday I had asked them if they wanted English names and they said yes. So I put up a list of female and male names on the board and started by reading through them all with the students. Then I let students choose a name whenever they answered a question. One of the boys wrote "Thank you!" on the slip of paper that I collected with each student's English and Chinese names on it. During dinner, although part of the sky was still a brilliant blue, the skies opened pretty dramatically, producing this beautiful rainbow.

Rainbow over the boys' dormitory.

On Thursday, I started really having some fun with my students. We were using verbs like climb(ed), play(ed), visit(ed), clean(ed) and nouns like classroom, teacher, tree, mountain, volleyball, and basketball. So I asked them which pairs of verb + noun were okay. They thought it was really funny when I asked "Can you play the classroom?" or, even better, "Can you climb the teacher?"

In addition to the three academic classes, we also have a fourth period that's supposed to be more fun and summer-camp like. On Tuesday I played my class four English songs and told them they could choose one for me to teach them: Haven't Met You Yet (Michael Buble), We Are the Champions, Brave (Sara Bareilles), and Let It Go. They overwhelmingly chose Let It Go (15 of 18). Apparently most of them have seen Frozen! By Friday we had gone over the whole song--the English lyrics and the Chinese translation--and sang through it a couple of times. Interestingly, although they can say "frozen fractals" okay, they have trouble with "crystallizes like an icy blast". They seem to be enjoying it though!