Teaching in China (Part 1)

I was offered a position teaching at 外交学院 in May 2005. Starting from June, I prepared teaching material every day until I left the USA on August 22. However, arriving in China, I quickly realized how useless all my preparation would be.

One of the most crippling things about working as a foreign teacher in China is that your school does not like to communicate with you at all. I have heard the same from everyone working anywhere as a teacher. The situation is the exact opposite of JET, where you are brainwashed into being a cookie-cutter teacher who will teach them “the JET way.”

This is good in some ways, as it allows you freedom to do anything with your class. However, it’s hard to decide what to do when you are not told what the students have done in the past, when you have no idea what their levels are and are completely uninformed about what the major’s objective is for students who successfully complete this class. The most I was ever told was that my English Writing students had to pass the TEM-4 (Test for English Majors 4) test in April 2006, and I was given no information about this test until December 2005.

I think my anxiety over this was exacerbated because I had never worked as a teacher in the past. Having to start a new job with no defined goals from your superior, and having your entire livelihood depend on not failing at this job since you couldn’t afford to even leave the country if you were fired, was a lot of pressure for me. I was on Xanax most of my first week just to survive.

In retrospect, the only class I felt was truly important was English Writing. This was the only “serious” class in the English Department that foreign teachers were allowed to teach, and it was the only time major students would ever study writing in their entire four years. Selecting what to teach was very difficult, and my colleague who taught the third year students handled it very differently than I did.

For anyone looking for ideas, this was my progression over the two 18 week semesters: Strunk & White’s Elements of Style to correct their train-wreck sentences, five-paragraph essays, long research paper accompanied by lectures about gathering source material and what makes a good source, newswriting (leads, hard news, features, reviews, editorials), three practice weeks for TEM-4, short stories and two weeks spent on poetry mechanics at the end.

Did I spend a lot of time on what was most important for the students? No. The school will have a Chinese teacher for this class next year, and I largely expect the class will become two 18 week semesters of preparing for TEM-4. Test results are all schools tend to care about in China. My goal was to introduce students to as many writing forms as possible and give them and opportunity to practice each. My hope was that whatever jobs the students find themselves in after graduating, if they are required to write something in English, they will be at least somewhat familiar with which style is needed thanks to my class. I also wanted to have them do fun and creative writing in hopes a few may take it to their MSN Blogs or notebooks and continue writing for fun. You can study writing for years, but unless you actually practice, you will never actually improve.

I would tell you my Oral English method, but I was a terrible teacher for that class. I am not a very outgoing person, and I have very poor conversation and people skills. Expecting me to pretend to be the cheery American who will play games with students and make them talk is a big mistake.

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