Demo Lessons

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These past two weeks I’ve been teaching demo lessons. The entire month of September is just demo lessons, which is both good and bad. The good part is, I’m finally teaching! I was getting pretty antsy to actually get into a classroom, and see what the students were really capable of. The bad part is that I can’t use the assigned curriculum yet (I was just told to make my class “fun”), and I’m trying to sell the students on English.



My English class is an elective, as opposed to the required one for the school. All the students must take English, but it’s taught by a Chinese teacher, and mostly in Chinese. Each student is allowed to choose a certain number of electives, and an English class taught by a foreigner all in English is an elective. So this month, I’m trying to convince the students to sign up for my class in addition to their Chinese-taught English class.



I won’t be starting the actual curriculum until October 8^th.



The student’s levels are not quite what I was expecting. Unlike Korea, most of them have not been exposed to an intensive all-English program. Despite the fact that they have been “taking English for at least 2 years,” they don’t seem to understand much. The result is that they are really great at repeating, and not so great at actually making sentences and answering questions. Hopefully when I have them in my class, and it’s a smaller group, I can really help them with their speaking.



Last week, I taught a demo lesson to one class from every grade. This week, I’ll be doing the same lessons again, just for different kids. All my classes have been going well, except for the first and second graders. They have such a low level of English that they don’t even understand the word “repeat” or “listen”. Luckily, the school decided that they can’t sign up for my elective.



The age range is so crazy – the school has students from first grade all the way to high school seniors. The first graders are so tiny! I can’t believe their parents have sent them away to a boarding school. They are literally the smallest people I have ever seen. I won’t be teaching the seniors, most likely, so I haven’t interacted with them much.



After this week is over, I still have one more week of “demos,” but I’m teaching kids that I’ve already taught. So some classes get TWO all English demo sessions. However, I was told today that the kids did their elective selections yesterday, and (shocker) more people signed up for English than spots are available. So, I’m kind of tired of doing pointless classes. I’m ready to just plan out my real semester and get started on that.

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Comments

[Marthe]

and you were afraid no one would sign up!
So more students signed up for elective English than you expected. That is great!

[EmilieWS]

Yep. I'm not surprised. You don't really have to "sell" English, I've noticed.