7-05-04
I'm a teacher. Well actually, I have been teaching for the past month. I have been teaching 3 twelve-year-old Korean kids (two boys and a girl) giving them private lessons mostly about english writing. It's been quite interesting and for the first time I've had a "real" teaching job. Their english was at a decent level since they had lived in New Zealand for 3 years. At first I thought I could just improvise the teaching but that wasn't the case. Twice a week, before my classes, I had to sit down and look stuff up on the internet and prepare a class to make it interesting. No 11 year old kid wants to be in private english writing lessons, and neither did these three. So I made up exercises and found various techniques to motivate them and it seemed to work because it appears as if they like the class now. I took some of my pictures and told them to write a story according to the theme on the image, and then also simply descriptive writing.
Then yesterday, I did a one-day teaching job. I had to teach 8 classes in one day. I got there late because the cab driver got lost, so I only taught seven. I went to a small school in the South of Beijing, a school where parents send their kids on an english summer camp program. What makes this program so attractive to parents is that on the pamphlet it says that one of the days is taught by a native english speaker. So the director of this school come to our University which is plagued with foreigners and tells us that they give us 1000 Yuan (120 USD) for 8 hours of teaching. So there I was, in a typical chinese school, filled up with kids from ages 5 to 13. I walked down the halls with herds of children surrounding me as I made my way through their classrooms in disbelief.
What did I have to talk about? I obviously had had no time to prepare this class, and had no idea what level of english they had. My first class was a little confusing. Not really knowing what to teach them, I just starting talking. After a while I realized they hadn't understood a word I had said, so I slowed down. I asked them about the things they liked to do, what they ate, how they went to school, which places in Beijing they had been to, and finally, the Zoo. This last one was generally the most successful topic since they love animals and know virtually every name. The funny thing is that when I asked them which their favorite animal was, in every single class, they said the Monkey. Then I asked why? and they all said "because he's very lovely", as if someone told them that all monkeys are like that, and if asked, to respond in such way. Weird. Anyhow, after struggling a little bit to get through the first class, I went on to my second and so on. My class just basically repeated itself 7 times. Sometimes I didn't know what I had taught in a particular class and accidentally repeated subjects. All the kids looked the same to me.
At the end of the class we would play hang-man. I would split it into categories such as: sports, animals, food, fruits, etc. They loved me by this time. When the class was over they just screamed of excitement and yelled "Zaijian Laoshi!!" (meaning: goodbye professor!). It felt good. I don't know if I made a permanent change in their english, but at that point in time they were happy and that felt nice inside. |
