My experience so far in “legitimate” teaching practice bare no resemblance to the teaching I am doing here. The only concrete similarities between my past experience and this are that there are students, a classroom, and a teacher (me). I have previously taught grade 9-12 Physical Education (it’s not “gym!”) and grade 11 & 12 Social Studies. Although I am trained for high school, when I was told I would be teaching elementary I didn’t bat an eye. I consider myself a pretty flexible person and I am willing to tackle any age of students in any content area. My personal philosophy builds on the fact that whatever I am teaching, I will always know more about it then the students will, which in essence makes me qualified to be their teacher. And I’m pretty sure I have a better handle of the English language then a bunch of Chinese eight year olds.
Most of the classes use Oxford English materials, and want us to use material out of those books. In reality, the books are pretty elementary, and our supervisors encourage us to add in as much supplemental English as we feel appropriate. This week I introduced the words rhino, fence, and the colours of Indigo and Violet. It makes it much more simple to teach about rainbows after they meet our friend ROY G. BIV.
Having taken TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) courses, I was prepared to create exciting writing and reading activities for students, but we are basically used as the students’ personal English Channel. We travel from class to class, and our goal is to get the students to speak as much English as possible in our short 35 minute classes. Being used to high school length 80 minute classes, I have found the adjustment to short lessons difficult, and in my first two weeks I haven’t been able to get to the end of a planned lesson. Because I mostly just want the students to speak, it is not that big of a deal but it’s something I need to improve as I progress. I’m sure within a couple of months my lessons will be a well-oiled machine.
As the only foreigner English teacher at either of my two schools, I can go an entire day without having a meaningful conversation. Thank God for technology. I'm set up with my own classroom as an office, so on mornings when I don't have teaching or prep to do I can catch up on hockey games on my personal classroom projector. This is a nice break from the monotony of teaching the same lesson over and over again, but it does provide me with some time to be able to think up inventive ways to reach the students. I'm always open to ideas.
Only time will tell how effective I can really be, but I look forward to the challenge. It can be intimidating to try new things in the classroom, but China is definitely the kindof place I can take some crazy risks. I’ll let you know how the experiment goes.
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