Ready, Set, Go!

After lots of waiting--unsure of when classes would actually begin--I finally began teaching yesterday. It was a pretty simple class: going over the class rules and doing a survey.

I settled on four simple class rules: Look, Listen, Study, Speak. After teaching them to say each word in English and explaining the importance of each, as well as what behaviour does and doesn't constitute each rule, I asked them to write each rule in English and Chinese and draw a picture to represent each rule.

Here are some of my favorite specimens:

One of the my biggest takeaways from the first class is to not only give clear directions, but to specify everything. When I told them to write their name on the paper, several students asked "Where?" Anywhere, 都可以! (Dou keyi: this literally means "all okay". It's a very useful phrase.)

And at the risk of being boring, I will now make them repeat the directions back to me more fully. Having said (in Chinese and with pointing) "This paper has four portions--one, two, three, four--because we have four rules. In each part write down one rule and draw a picture" there were still some students who wrote them all together in one part of the paper, or jumbled up on one side of the paper, leaving the other side blank. I think following directions is going to be a new goal for my class this year. That being said, some of them seem overly concerned with following directions. I told them to number their paper 1-8 and one student was very concerned when she kept going and wrote 9 too! I assured her that it was fine.

Here are some statistics from my survey:
- 4 classes of 52 students each = 208 students (4 were absent, so 204 were surveyed).
- 5 students (2.4%) are from minority groups.
 - 4 students are Hui (回). The distinctive characteristic of the Hui are that they are Muslim (and therefore don't eat pork, the most commonly consumed meat in China). Unlike the other minorities, however, they aren't defined by a distinct language, so these students probably won't be behind in school as many other minority students are (since Mandarin is already their second language and English their third).
-1 student is LiSu (傈僳). Apparently the Lisu people are thought to have inhabited this area for thousands of years.
-83 students have had some limited exposure to English.

The rest of the data is taking some time to input since first I need to decipher the handwriting and look up all the characters I don't know. There are a lot of characters in names that aren't used much elsewhere and they didn't give me rosters--although I've found two classes' rosters in their classrooms, one nicely posted on the door, one under a pile of books, the others I will search for this evening. Rosters help me decipher the student's handwriting, but I still need to look up characters to type them into my computer.

71 down, 133 to go. I'm glad it's the weekend.