Teaching!
I figured it was just about time to talk about what I did in China, which among other things was teach English to some excellent post graduate Chinese students!
To my disbelief, I was told during the first professional meeting with the administrators of Changchun University of Technology that I was selected to instruct post-grad students at the university. Wow, I thought, I just graduated from college, and now I’M RESPONSIBLE FOR POST-GRADS. The admins buttered me up with some flattering remarks that, after reviewing my resume, they considered I was the most capable for the job. I was in for a rude awakening.
Unlike some of the other foreign English teachers, I was not given a textbook to work from, and was responsible for developing a total curriculum. What the admins neglected to tell me was that I was going to be teaching an army of eager students.
So, when I entered the classroom my first day on the job, I was greeted by raucous applause from nearly 90 students… what did I prepare for my first lesson? Well, following my TEFL training I had prepared a simple meet and greet with some pronunciation drills. The TEFL training, by the book, said I should form a circle with the desks. The desks were ironed in place by blots. I scraped the meet and greet, and some how made it through the first two-hour period by improvising group work presentations on Chinese education. Clever me.
Class 9, panel 1... a panorama of my largest class...
Panel 2
Panel 3
As post-grad students in their mid to late twenties, most were older than me, so I hid my age and let them think I was older and more mature. Suckers. We had a good time though, and they loved my first homework assignment: send me an email requesting the subjects they most wanted to study, and introduce themselves.
After my first week I gauged I was responsible for about 400 students. The class monitors, semi-elected class representatives, were kind enough to provide a list of student names. Roll call at the beginning of class consumed about 10 minutes, and it took about a month to get a grip on faces-to-names.
The sheer number of students was a major shock, and coming from a history of small schools with intimate class sizes, I was forced to eliminate some of my prepared lesson plans. By the end of my second week I was already burnt out, and approached my boss asking for a modest raise in my salary, reflecting the new situation. The other English teachers at the university had about half the number of students, I reasoned, it couldn’t hurt to ask I figured, given I was being asked to double my workload. My boss’s response? A good chuckle, and some words of encouragement. I was told quite frankly to give it another week or two, and watch as most of them would drop out.
True to her prediction, the class size dwindled to fifty, then twenty students. As post-grad students with a long history of mandatory English classes, I was left with a core group that genuinely wanted to be there. So for the rest of the term I was able to re-adjust my lessons, playing detective “who-dunnit” games and instructing them on the language of debate.
Teaching English!
By the end of the first month the class size dwindled to a manageable level!
The ability to interrupt, in a cordial manner, is something totally lacking when students are learning English. That’s understandable to a degree, who would want to stop a student from speaking when he or she is on a roll?
More than any single lesson, I felt it was important to teach originality and thoughtful analysis. Route memorization, as I was told, was how students got into college. Higher learning demands, well, higher learning.
I emphasized that in a debate, YOUR position is right, and THEIR position is wrong. Think what the other side will argue, come up with counter arguments and hammer in outside-the box ideas. Also, as I was taught at school, a good presentation, debate etc., follows a simple formula:
1. Tell us what you will say
2. Say it
3. Tell us what you said
Actually, that’s a lesson I want to beat into the heads of some of the experts in Washington, D.C. whenever they give presentations at conferences.
As the term was winding down I was supposed to give a final exam covering the lessons we learned throughout the course. The assignment was to work in pairs and write a four-page paper on their perspectives of International Relations, principally the relationship between the USA and China, and give a presentation to the class on their findings. Easy enough yeah? Wrong, and if you thought so you get an F-.
Things fell apart right-quick. First, remember that legion of students who dropped out? Well, they all came roaring back for the final exam, and they expected a decent grade. What could I do except fail 75% of them, as I had been taking roll the entire term and many had only attended two or three classes? The second problem was blatant plagiarism. This was especially the case with the drop out students, who turned in the exact same paper they found and downloaded from the Internet. Those downloaded papers were terrible to begin with, which mostly looked at eating habits in China and US; “in China we use chopsticks, and Americans use a knife and fork”. Worst. Analysis. Ever. More importantly, the plagiarism felt like a slap in the face, and the next class I diplomatically explained that if this shoddy, unoriginal and downloaded work had been turned into profs in the US they could face the risk of being expelled from school.
I felt guilty for handing out so many failing grades, and I decided to take the extra time outside of class and give the students who wanted a chance to write a paper and explain, one-on-one, why plagiarism was so serious. Not every student took advantage of this offer, and they failed, but others were genuinely apologetic. The most common explanation was that plagiarism was endemic to university work and other profs accepted it. (As a side note, the # 1 course for plagiarism at the university was the mandatory Marxism class, nearly every student handed in the exact same paper as the class was not taken seriously by anyone.) One of my students went so far as to say, “but I worked so hard finding a paper online…” That one made me laugh, and told him next time, work as hard writing an original and thoughtful piece.
The worst offenders were the Political Science students. It felt like a test of wills dealing with them: as an entire class they turned in the same paper, taken from the Internet. These were Political Science students, and naturally should have done a bang-up-job. These “Young Pioneers”, aspiring members of the Communist Party, focused their energies on crafting Marxism papers, and my guess is that they were embarrassed to tell me about Communist thought. I’ve read the Communist manifesto, as well as translated works by Mao (any aspiring Chinese expert needs to do so) so I was bummed I couldn’t hear about their perspectives.
So, as Voltaire famously said, “pour encourager les autres” I stuck by my harsh position and failed the majority of students. Simply put, I didn’t think it was fair to the great students who showed up to every class and handed in excellent, original and thoughtful work. For the others, perhaps they learned something too, if not English then at least how to shape up and be better students.
For those interested I’ll post an example of excellent student work in the future, as well as another example of shoddy, plagiarized and terrible student performance.
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