Teacher C

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November 11th 2011

Published: November 11th 2011

Teacher C

Sorry about the delay folks-- it has not been of lethargy or a lack material; rather a profusion of material and a lack of time.

"You are who you pretend to be." --Kurt Vonnegut

"Fail, fail again, fail better." --Samuel Beckett

Somehow I ended up Here.

Here: I am writing this on a wonderfully efficiently subway, riding clear across Shanghai to the closest thing I have to home for several thousands miles in any direction: Vincent and Kitty's roomy apartment in the Pudong district.

My throat is sore. My hands are caked in chalk. My mind is chiefly concerned with lesson plans for several hundred different students....

That's right-- hundreds. Indeed, how is it that I can peer down at a buttoned shirt and jeans and say that it is now a teacher, albeit a new one, who wears them?

...

It will only do to begin at the beginning.

If you asked me some 8-12 months ago the question that is typically asked of kids my students' age--What do you want to be when you grow up?-- I probably would have replied "teacher." I believed in the philosophy behind teaching, why it is needed in the world today, its ability to create meaningful and lasting change. I still largely believe in it.

But the notion of literally having a job teaching classes of my own students seemed a fargone possibility, a pleasant daydream. Even the idea of teaching in here in China resided largely in myth and imagination; while I knew it was at least possible, I was sure neither of what to expect nor what was expected of me.

So when I walked into the Cheery English teaching center in Shanghai some two weeks ago for an interview, you might have been able to say this: pent-up idealistic fervor was meeting with boyish curiosity and an incredible desire to answer the question: "Wow, could this really happen?" I wanted to see magic happen before me--being an explorer one moment and contractually guaranteed teacher the next. And then I wanted to prove to myself I could earn the title.

It went something like this:

I took the stairs--not elevator--to the sixth floor of 6th floor of No.16, Song-Yuan Rd and shook hands with my future boss: a short Chinese woman with glasses and an incredible talent for looking consistently distracted. Her English was passable, by no means perfect.

As the interview progressed--my first job interview of any kind--I got the feeling that whatever cordiality she was sporting was a poor disguise for business-like indifference. I had good reason to be suspicious.

Things treaded along well enough until she threw the big bombshell into the open.

"Chris, you tell me you like kids, but I am worried about your lack of experience. Would it be OK if we did a demo?"

"Of course." No way.

I'm led to a small room with chairs and a white board and am given 15 mintues to prepare. The closest I've ever come to teaching kids this age (or any age really) was an experience during my sophomore year of high school in which myself and two of my peers tutored French at our local middle school. I couldn't have gotten prepared if they gave me 2 hours.

Soon enter Cindy, Angenlina and Suzy, each 5 or 6 years old. The best way to imagine the ensuing 15 minutes would be to think of yourself as an actor who has just been asked to play a part, and that part is teaching English. This your audition.

I reviewed colors with them.

Before I knew it my future boss leads me outside away from the training room and says:

"Chris! It seems like you do have teaching experience. Can we meet this weekend, and work out the terms of the contract?"

"Of course!"

No way.

...

You walk into class. You're dressed nicely, outwardly beaming and confident, inwardly bespeckled. This is your first class ever--there are roughly 30 nine years sitting patiently before you.

...

You're a 9 year old Chinese kid currently attending school in Shanghai. Your grades are decent, you have a nice bunch of friends and a loving family. Your teachers are strict and you have 8 classes a day, which is normal in China. You've consistently had an English class for 4 years now, and are used to the idea of a foreign English teacher.

But whomever just walked in to your classroom is young and new. Wow, really young. Is he really your teacher? Where is he from? Canada? Singapore? He scans over the students, catches your eye for just a moment. Smiling, he utters:

"Good Morning class..."

And does so 8 more times that day, the next day, the day after that and Thursday.

...

It all sounds a little surreal doesn't it?

Actually--to continue the actor metaphor--it was a lot like the curtain was rising on a play for which I had not rehearsed. as I spoke lines I made up on the spot. There were many players on stage helping to drive the plot forward, but only a few were characters who actually mattered.

There was the company, a minor character, that hired me for 9000 RMB a month at 25 hours a week. These were business people, not humanists, not educators, not teachers in themselves. Their concern, I would continually discover, was not really the well-being of the teachers they hire or the edification of the students they affect. Their concern was running a business which places foreign English teachers in local primary schools. No more, no less. And you were more a schedule, a tally mark on their roster of needed and providable teachers, than an actual person.

Then there were the other foreign English teachers--my colleagues. I have met friends and mentors, picked up advice across a whole spectrum of prerogatives, from living in Shanghai to dealing with obnoxious students. Most are middle aged. Quite a few are fellow Americans, but I've met teachers from Canada, Russia--even the Ukraine.

And the final minor role was played by the Chinese English teachers, the majority of whom were very cordial and respectful. I would be in close contact with them on a daily basis.

And then there was me.

18 years old, utterly inexperienced, unfamiliar with the class material--me, and the students I taught. We made up the primary characters. Our trials, our successes, the difficulties and rewards encountered within any student/teacher relation: they would be the main theme of this play, and indeed, my coming life.

...

So what happened?

Simple: The first week I was baptized. That is the only word for it. They put me in class after class, until I died and was born anew, with a new name. As the legend goes, foreign teachers have notoriously difficult names to pronounce for young Chinese students, and are simply dubbed after their first initial. Before me it was Teacher K; now Teacher C carries the torch. This is how I am known to my students. Teacher C.

Teacher C teaches over 500 different students in a given week.

...

It was not so much the amount of students that got me when I first looked at my schedule. By then I was beginning to understand that the foreign English teacher is more a traveling showman than anything. The foreign English teacher cannot give grades or homework, cannot punish by sending students outside or calling home. If he wishes to motivate his students he must emphasize himself as the exception to the type of classes they are used to (a Chinese teacher dictating and barking all class). He must don a personality, promise games, songs, stickers: devise a rewards system completely unto himself, such that his students feel special and privileged to attend his class--he is looked forward to. If the teacher is smart enough to understand his place and potential, each day, each class becomes a creative adventure, in which he puts to use a practiced bag of tricks.

So the 500 plus kids is a deceptively daunting number because each of the 22 classes (each about half an hour long) that make up those 500 student entails a lot less work than it would a regular classroom. No, what really got me was the fact that I would be teaching grades 1 through 5. My bag of tricks would have to span wide enough to accommodate the psychological disparities between a 6 year old and a 10 year old. And they are many and significant, let me assure you.

...

Here is some of what I am learning as Teacher C gradually comes to the fore and Chris steadily abstains from the classroom.

I am learning by the metaphorical equivalent of running blindfolded through a maze until I find my way to the other side. I hereby formally apologize to those students whose class time I used as a training center to "fail better."

I am learning how to run the gambit of almost every possible primary school student you could imagine, adapting to the sheer variety of skill levels, ages and temperaments presented to me. Each grade is using a different book and learning progressively more difficult material. First grade is incomparable to fourth grade. And then, within the grade levels there is variation among each of the classes--what is the textbook page discrepancy between class 4 grade 5 and class 2 grade 5? for instance. Each grade, each class, each student moves at their own pace.

I am learning how to fill 35 minutes of class time with activities that grab the attention of kids who can opt to ignore you at little cost to themselves. (I have played more Hangman, Rock, paper, scissors, and Snakes N' Ladders in the past few weeks than should be rightly allotted to someone in a given lifetime)

I am learning how to look at a page in each of the 5 different student textbooks I have and see all the right and wrong ways to present the material in class.

I am learning how to make a lesson plan:

School: Yucai Grade: 3 Immediately divide the class into teams (let them choose their team name, of course) promising stickers for the team winner, add and dock points throughout class depending on how bad/good they are, play a warm up game, jump into the lesson (today it was "My House"), review new vocabulary, draw a map with chalk of a typical house and end the day with a rousing game of throw Garfield (yes I have a now very popular Garfield play toy) at the board and tell the teacher which room he is in.

I have students who treat you like a God-send, wait upon your every word and action, give you gifts, ask for your autograph. Students for whom your presence is truly a treat, especially if willing to satisfy their expectations of a magician, a showman. They will yell in delight upon your arrival and bid you a voluminous good-bye.

And I have students on the other end of the spectrum, too. There is the brand of students, usually fourth and fifth grade, who have become jaded in the presence of a foreign English teacher, understand there are no immediate consequences to defying him, and would much rather talk and play amongst themselves. I've learned that with these kids it is doubly important to make sure Chris, his fears, worries, and issues are left at the door, and that it is Teacher C who does his best to impart knowledge and practice. Surely I'll continue to work on strategies to earn the trust and attention of these more difficult classes.

And, of course, I have every kind of student in between.

I am learning that if you aren't careful, a class can tear you apart. I have experienced what I now believe to be the worst fear of any given teacher: impotency, lack of control. I know first hand what it is to speak and not be listened to, to try and be casually discarded. I have gone through terrible guilt trips over teachers I at any time was rude to (my sincerest apologies, Mr. Ward).

I am learning classroom management skills: when to let something go, when to show your teeth, how to deal with that one student who always seems to be creating trouble. It's just as much an art as actually teaching the material.

I am learning how to brace myself against the fatigue, wear and tear of moving from class to class, school to school (I have one morning school and one afternoon school). How to make to sure I at least try to give the same effort for the first class of the day as for the seventh or eighth.

I am learning of some of the joys of teaching. Little things. Students wave to you on the bus ride home. I help a particular kid out one class, and make his day. I have a little conversation with a student of mine as she walks home with her mother. Kids run up and give your legs a hug out of nowhere.

I am learning about what styles of teaching I naturally gravitate towards, how effective they are, and how I can improve upon them. Who is Teacher C, what defines his classroom? How does that compare with the teachers he himself has had?

I am learning these things and innumerable others, and will doubtless continue the learning process in the coming months.

...

It is perhaps most surprising for me to now think that teaching only amounts to one aspect of this journey, that I will in (I project) three to four months time move on. I will have made enough money by that time to finance much if not all of my trip, considering I currently pay no rent and total daily expenses typically amount to less than 10 US dollars.

I had felt in the time leading up to this trip and within its first month that part of my time here would have to, one way or the other, be spent contributing to people, that I would give my services in some way. So now it is a matter of, at the end of four months, being able to declare: those kids are better off in some aspect or manner because of my benefaction, my honest work as a teacher. I'd like to think I am well on my way to making this so.

I will conclude with a small amendment to Mr. Vonnegut's quote:

"You become who you pretend to be."

Chris Stasse
--Vincent and Kitty's roomy apartment,
Shanghai

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