Ok. Well it’s been a long time since I’ve written. But GUYS
here’s why it’s been so long: I’M A TEACHER NOW!! And it turns out BEING A
TEACHER TAKES A LOT OF TIME.
I’ve been at it for about six weeks now, and let me tell you
another thing I have learned about teaching: IT IS NOT EASY. And also: CHINESE
STUDENTS PICK CRAZY ENGLISH NAMES FOR THEMSELVES. Here is a sampling of my
students’ names (Yes, I really use them in class. And I don’t even register the
ridiculousness anymore.):
To Be, Seraphim, Water, Villard, Shulamite, Lion, Water, Passion,
Moonlen, Coach, Silence, Mummy, Crocodile, Brain, Sherlock, Edison, Hiccup, and
Captain Jack Sparrow.
This phenomenon leads to classroom interactions like the
following:
Ms. Peters [Walking up
to a table of boys who have been “writing in their journals” for the past five
minutes]: Guys!! What are you doing?? Why are your notebooks totally
blank???
Student: My name is Blank!
So it was.
Most of our students, including just about all in the
preceding list, brought their names with them from previous English classes.
For the ones who didn’t have an English name, I brought in a list of fairly
common American names (which, by the way, I did not pick strategically enough,
leaving me with classes full of Tims, Toms, Jims, Jacks, Jeffs and Johns.
Dammit. NO ONE SYLLABLE BOYS’ NAMES NEXT YEAR. Also, side note, there may well be
a Chinese student in my class named after you, because I figured my friends’
names would be easier to remember. Sorry I’m not sorry.) from which they chose.
Sometimes, though, they don’t want to pick from the list and
come up with names out of nowhere. I tried to convince Villard to pick “Kyle,”
but for unknown reasons, his whole class thought that “Kyle” was the craziest,
most ridiculous name ever. So he went with Villard. Whatever.
Since they only use their English names in our class, these
names don’t seem like a big deal to them. What they forget is that their
English names, to us, are their real names, since they THE ONLY NAMES WE KNOW
THEM BY (if learning 130 English names was hard, 130 Chinese names, complete
with tones and characters, would have been pretty much impossible). This makes
it problematic when they change their names without telling you. Especially
when they do it multiple times. Yeah, Jack/Jordan/Tom, I’m looking at you. When
Franky became Archimonde, he at least had the decency to let me know.
Alright alright alright let me back up and explain some
things. I work at Yali Middle School, confusingly named since it is actually a
high school of about 4000 students in the equivalent of tenth, eleventh, and
twelfth grades. Some of them live nearby with their families in Changsha, but
many of them board on Yali’s campus, where I also live. I teach 130 15-year-old
students, divided into four classes. Three of the classes I see three times a
week each, and the last class (for reasons too complicated and boring to
intone) I teach just once a week. My class is called Oral English, and it
supplements their formal written English classes, taught by a Chinese teacher. They
call me Ms. Peters. Sometimes, for reasons I can’t really figure out, just
Peters. Sometimes Peter.
Now, in case I’ve managed to hide this fact from you, I went
to a New England prep school and. At the time, I thought I was worked pretty
hard.
I was wrong.
These students have class from 8:20am to 5:30pm. They have a
twenty-five minute break in the morning, during which they head out to the main
field and do physical exercises, like, I don’t know, running around the track.
In the evenings the students who board have mandatory self-study in their
classrooms from 7 to 10. 10:30 is lights out in the dorms, where they sleep
eight to a room, and they’re up by 6:30 the next morning. They have classes
some Saturdays and even the occasional Sunday. Their schooling all leads up to
a huge two-day test they take June of their senior year. The dreaded 高考 (literally “high test”),
is the only factor determining their college acceptance. Let me say that again:
Their grade on the高考 is the only
factor which determines their college acceptance. Colleges don’t see
their transcripts. There are no essays, no resumes, no APs. No interviews. No
letters of recommendation. Sick on the
day of the test? Tough it out or wait until next year. This is not a schooling
system designed to minimize student stress.
* * *
No big deal, but we’re sort of celebrities on campus. This
is partially because we are pretty obviously foreigners in a school and a city
that is quite extremely racially homogeneous. But it is also partially because
we gave a speech to the entire school at the first day of school opening
ceremony (little did I know when I entered that hellish contest in Beijing that
my Chinese speech-making career had only just begun). Since no single Yali room
is big enough for all 4000 students, only about 800 got to watch our speech in
person. Never fear—the ceremony was live-broadcasted to the rest of the
students. So sometimes, when I pass students around campus they look at me with
wide “WOAH I never thought I’d see you in person” eyes. Unless they’re wide
“WOAH remember when I and also all my classmates listened to you publically butcher
our native language cause I sure do” eyes. In any case, they notice when we go
by.
Many of our students have been studying English for many
years, and many of them speak fairly well. Most of them, though, have had
little contact with American English speakers, and our accents and speaking
speed are jarring to them. I have developed a classroom voice (about twice as
slow and twice as loud as my normal speaking voice) which I use with my students—sometimes
as Marie, one of our two second-year Yale-China teachers, and I are walking
back to our apartment for lunch after class, we have not quite snapped out of
it yet (HOW. WERE. YOUR. CLASSES?).
Our students are in their first year at Yali, so their
English levels are all quite different and have not had a chance to be leveled
out much by common classroom experience. It is, I’ve learned, a really good
idea (but also pretty difficult) to anticipate which words will be new vocabulary,
so you can come up with a good simple definition or a Chinese translation.
Defining on the fly gets a bit dicey:
All too real Scenario
1:
Ms. Peters: Hang on do you guys know the word “represent”
means?
Class: No…
Ms. Peters: Oh. Um. It’s when something stands for something
else.
Class: …
Ms. Peters: OK. Watch this. [Ms. Peters draws four stick figures on the board.] This is my
family. [Points to the tallest one]
This is my brother. Now, is this REALLY my brother?
Class: …
Ms. Peters: NO!! MY BROTHER IS NOT A BLUE STICK FIGURE ON A
CHALKBOARD IN CHINA!!!
Class: …
Ms. Peters: THIS PICTURE REPRESENTS
MY BROTHER. I CAN USE IT TO TALK ABOUT HIM EVEN THOUGH IT ISN’T REALLY HIM.
Class: …
Ms. Peters: Um, well now that we’ve got that down…
Unfortunately
hypothetical Scenario 2:
Ms. Peters: Hang on do you guys know the word “represent”
means?”
Class: No…
Ms. Peters: It means 代表.
Class: Oh! Got it!
But, you know, you live and learn. Plus, I think some of
them actually did get that stick figure thing. And the ones that didn’t at least
looked up when I started shrieking about blue stick figures in China. Sigh.
It’s also hard to judge what kind of assignments will work
and which ones will flop. My homework assignment on idioms, asking students to
define some given idioms and use them in a sentence (How hard can that be??)
fell unfortunately into the latter category:
"The snake was
in cold blood."
"We walked along the street neck and neck."
"The winter comes and I get cold feet."
"The man ran amok because his car was broken."
"When I made mistakes, I lost my face.”
"We walked along the street neck and neck."
"The winter comes and I get cold feet."
"The man ran amok because his car was broken."
"When I made mistakes, I lost my face.”
On the other hand, I asked them the next week to write a
short paragraph analyzing Billy Collins’ awesome “Introduction to Poetry,”
(read it!!!) a poem we’ve been studying which explicitly encourages students to
look imaginatively and closely at poetry, to explore its many facets, to
connect with it in a personal and visceral way:
“We should love the poem and love the life. If we don’t love
the life, we can’t understand what the poem say. We should be careful to read
the poem. And we should read every words. To understand the poem’s emotion. We
shouldn’t read poem quickly. If we do that, we will feel boring and we don’t
like the poem anymore. So let’s love the poem and life.”
Let’s.
