Blackboard Jumble

Meet me on the corner

You know I never thought about what you call Chinese whispers in China. When Lawrie and I agreed to meet our interpretation got lost between the China bank and the China cafe. As it turned out we were at the cafe and he was at the bank. Let's face it we were in China, nothing works exactly according to plan. We eventually arrived at the college were shown to our room and as we had no plans ended up observing a class the same afternoon.










It was a village school and we were observing a class of 7/8 year olds who were attentive and enthusiastic. There were only 6 or 8 in the class so it was easy to give them attention and we left optimistically anticipating teaching our first class the next day.
We arrived back at college and went back to our room full of ideas of how to take grade 3 forward and what we might do for grade 5 and 6. so much so the we were late getting back to college for dinner. We were told 5.30 / 6.00 but when we arrived at 5.50 the tables looked like a battlefield and we decided to eat elsewhere. Lawrie had suggested that we give a talk later that evening so we found somewhere to eat and got back at 7 ready for our 7.30 talk only to find that our talk was book4d for 6.30 so we were ushered into the class and had to deliver a talk by the seat of our pants. Winging it seems to be the professional explanation but we got through and spent an enjoyable hour or so talking about anything and everything.













Thursday. First day teaching- Help! A class of 30 kids,(grade 3) aged about 6 who don't understand anything more than “hello”.
What do you do? Winging It, is a term me and my colleagues used frequently at College. Here i am doing it again but to an audience who don't know what the hell i'm talking about!! So after repeating “Hello my name is Sue” and “what is your name” about a million times and them repeating rather than answering my question (i'm sure they can't all be called sue!) i realised this was not going to be as easy it looked. (We observed some other volunteers at a really small school yesterday-didn't look too bad the kids were lovely and wanted to please- unlike today).
Anyway we, Gordon and i chose to teach together today and boy were we glad i don't know who would have run out first if we hadn't.
There was a lot of telepathy used today luckily we recognised the look of desperation on each others face as to how to make this lesson last 45 mins and not lose too many children, When they are bored they just leave and go out to play, i had a vision of standing there with no-one left!!!
So we kept going with our lesson plan (roughly), wrote and chanted the alphabet and got the kids to come and circle the correct letter of the alphabet, after a couple of false starts, they soon got the hang of it. (Ooh use this one again!).
We soon realised that they are taught by rote. You say it they repeat it, doesn't seem to matter what it is ,no real understanding at this age. So now we know what works using the same principle we showed flash cards of objects eg. Banana they repeat the word then someone comes up and circles the letter it starts with. Now/ the noisy kids at the back want to jon in. Great, doesn't seem to really matter if they get it right still happy to give it a try (only real mistake i made was using “umbrella” and them looking really confused, Gordon reminded me they haven't learnt the alphabet phonetically -oops!)
Need to find better resources! Felt very relieved when bell went, we survived, just.






















Now have another 45 mins of (grade 6-aged about 9 or 10), we were told this would be easier as they had been learning English for a few years. Right so why are there a number of the kids looking very bored or even falling asleep?
Found out afterwards that they all take an exam at the end of this year. If they don't learn enough English, their education will finish early, they will probably never leave their village (these are rural schools).
They will not be able to work in Yangshuo where there is a high demand for some English to be spoken as it is the second most popular tourist area in China after the Great Wall.
I assume the kids who are interested in the lesson are the ones who want to improve their opportunities.
Our first problem with this lesson was the Chinese teacher asked us to talk about Festivals, well Thanksgiving to be precise..... we are English but they want American English!! Ok another Winging It session ( must do some research ie facts and dates for next week.) managed to spend the whole session teaching about festivals in England, America and China and relating them to the months of the year.
Then hangman-using all words used today- ooh! too easy class scores 6, teacher scores 0 ,ok got to work on this one their spelling is very good, better than their oral skills. Again great to hear the bell.









We had a Chinese teacher in with us who said afterwards he didn't undertand a lot of what we were talking about so probably neither did they.
Now i know why others just keep repeating the same lessons.Less sentences just words. We are there to improve their oral skills so must keep them talking, more planning needed.
Was worried when the teacher said please help us to teach his children, what should he do to get them to learn!!! If he doesn't know what chance do we stand!

left the day thinking yeah, just like England some great kids and some horrible ones, some who want to learn and some who don't, you aren't going to win them all but if the ones who want to learn another language are helped by us being there, then its worth it.
A great day, very tiring and definitely the most beautiful place i have ever taught in.

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