Teaching!

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The teaching has been going great. I'm teaching Oral English to the four freshman and four sophomore classes of English majors. Each class meets once a week for 90 minutes, and my Fridays are free. All of my classes have around 30 students, except for one which has 41. English majors take courses with Chinese teachers and professors on grammar, vocab, phonetics, writing, reading, and even listening, meaning my class is primarily for them to practice speaking. So I mostly come up with activities and exercises for them, though there is enough room for actual instruction that I'm staying interested: the freedom in my curriculum is a double-edged sword in that I can teach pretty much whatever I like, but I'm coming up with lesson plans every week from scratch and I don't have a sense of the trajectory of the course. My loose requirements are to cover certain chapters in a textbook (not an Oral English textbook, however, so the chapters just determine the topic content -- shopping, sports, travel, family, etc.) as well as a few additional topics like debate, negotiation, and how to give a speech or presentation. I make ad hoc corrections on what I note to be frequent mistakes (ex. "I very like it" and "Welcome you next time"), and some of my own lessons have included:

- alternative greetings and goodbyes and matching responses, because I noticed that even my best sophomores with impressive vocabularies would only ever say "Hello" and "Fine, thanks" when they'd see me on campus, and would usually freeze up if I said something like, "Hey guys, how's it goin' today?";

- how to pronounce the 'th', because 99%!o(MISSING)f my students pronounce the voiceless one as an 's' and the voiced one as a 'z' (like many French speakers, among other groups), and it's one of the few pronunciations you can actually practice in front of a mirror to see if you're doing right;

- "filler" words (ex. um, uh, well, y'know), not only because it's good to try to do everything in the target language, but also because by far the most common filler in Mandarin, 那个, sounds stunningly similar, as every English speaker quickly and jarringly realizes upon arriving in China, to the n-word in English.

Nearly all of my 250 students are motivated, enthusiastic, and hard-working. Most have chosen an English name, which are usually common but each class has a few gems: Smiling, Sunshine, Zero, Walle (from the movie), Royal, Theron, Hebe, Feeling, Bunny, Seraph, Seven, two Avrils (the singer Lavigne is quite popular here), Fly, Echo, Yoyo, Venson, Shell, Cage, Engle, Rainy, Mickle, Tim Henry, Rainforest, two Dreams, Bear, and my two favorite names of them all, Napoleon and Ophelia. Also, the following students sit next to each other: Sydney and Cindy; Winter and Spring (I have a Summer in another class; no Autumns or Falls); Cathy and Catherine; Tina and Tania; and Angelina and Angela sit in the same row. And in one class of 30 freshmen with only 10 English names, I have two Tinas and two Christinas, and Chén and Chéng sit next to each other. Now that I think about it, maybe they do this on purpose.

In what I've learned from other foreign teachers is quite common here in "communist" China, half of my classes are from a special college in the university, a cash cow in which students whose exam scores aren't high enough for admission but whose families have money pay exorbitant tuition get the full experience anyway (I forget whether their diploma is identical). Eliciting participation in these classes is sometimes like pulling teeth, but I really can't complain; in the grand scheme, their self-motivation is more than sufficient.

I'm teaching in a distraction-free environment that allows me to focus on honing aspects of teaching like my classroom presence, following and making adjustments to my lesson plans during class, grading homework assignments (BOY does it take a long time!), developing and maintaining a good attendance and grading system, and even writing on the board (my handwriting is actually pretty well suited for a chalkboard, but a reference for Stuy grads: I break so much chalk, it makes Gary Jaye look like a model of grace and tranquility. Yeah, MQ5 anyone?). I've been observed four times so far and gotten excellent reviews (and the foreign language sent a photographer to my class to stage some photos of me "teaching" outdoors), though my lesson planning has taken me longer and been more last-minute than I'd like, and the homework to grade keeps piling up. But all in all it's been great.

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