Bruce Teaching English In China: Final week of teaching summer institute

Fatigue is starting to set in

I’ve noticed that not only amongst myself but most of my colleagues that we’re all pretty tired from four weeks of Summer Institute and 3 weeks of teaching

I don’t know what it is but even though I get 8 hours of sleep a night I still wake up feeling a little bit of malaise every morning, but then I eat a nice greasy Chinese pancake (煎饼) and the grease just really gets my heart a pumping

On Monday, some TFC teachers were in the “I’m this close to falling asleep” position which is both elbows on the desk with the head on the folded elbows looking at the presenter

I kept on telling some of the fellows “加油” (Which is kind of like saying “You can do it!”) and they all responded with a groan, “Nooooooooo”

I just wanted to share this photo of a guy welding bars together outside of our school with no gloves or protective eye glasses. Now that's manly.

New goal for Summer Institute

My goal is to make kids reply to the question, “How are you?” with something besides, “I’m fine. Thank you,” because I’m absolutely sick of it

I’ve had to have asked not only every single student in my class but probably 20 or so other students in the summer camp that question and EVERY ONE OF THEM replies with “I’m fine. Thank you.”
We have taught them 5 or so different phrases like, “I’m super”, “I’m awesome”, “I’m crazy”, etc. and they always reply with “I’m fine. Thank you.”

I’m at the point right now that if I can teach every one of them to say, “This is the worst day of my life,” or “I hate you Mr. Spencer,” then I will be a happy man.

This isn’t a problem just in my own class either

A fellow teacher told me the story that she taught her children the dialogue about, “How is the weather today?” along with 7 or 8 different ways to answer and she said that the next day when she quizzed them they all (about 17 of them) said, “The weather is fine.”
So she said that this next round of questions they can’t use the word, “fine” so she asked her smartest student the question again and he said, “The weather is terrible” and then she asked her other students

Every student responded with, “The weather is terrible”
FACEPALM

At least Chinese people joke about it themselves

I was talking to one Chinese fellow about it and she told this joke about how these two characters in the Chinese textbook that almost everyone reads (we’ll call them Meimei and Hanlun because I can’t remember the names) and the scene involved Meimei hiking up a mountain

Well Meimei slipped and fell and ended up breaking her leg and is screaming in agony but luckily Hanlun happens to be hiking that same mountain that day
Hanlun sees Meimei obviously in agony and asks her, “Meimei, how are you?” and Meimei responds with, “I’m fine. Thank you”

This all goes back to the child psychology lecture we had on Monday

There was a professor who talked to us TFC Foreign Fellows about the differences in western and Chinese children and she had some pretty interesting points to make
We learned about psychological experiments done between western people and east Asian/Chinese people that really showed how our culture shapes the way we think

2 fish in a bowl experiment

So this one involves a psychologist showing people a picture of two fishes in a bowl and asking the participants to describe what they see
Western people were more likely to describe the bowl and the fish (It’s a bowl with two fish in it) while Chinese people were more likely to describe the relationship between the fishes (They’re two star-crossed lovers)

Photo experiment

This one was really cool, so a psychologist asked Western people and east Asian people to take photos of a woman
Western people really focused on the face and that woman’s face made up probably 85-90% of the picture while east Asian people put a lot of the background into the picture so that the woman’s face took up 10% of the photo

Don’t eat hot tofu

So one of the cool idioms that I learned about in Chinese class this week is “Don’t eat hot tofu” which means basically that you shouldn’t worry about things right now, just let it rest for a little bit and then everything will be ok.

So next time I see a person who doesn’t know Chinese idioms who is angry and I want to make them laugh by saying something random I’ll say, “Hey…don’t eat hot tofu, it'll be alright”

My class management system is going alright

Now I know that if I want kids attention before class, show them American money

Something about a 1 dollar bill just makes kids drop what they’re doing and rush to you like white on rice
However, set clear expectations that you will not be giving them said dollar

I made the mistake of showing kids a 20 dollar bill and then the even bigger mistake of telling them how much it’s worth in Chinese currency so now my students think that they’re going to get the 20 dollar bill at some point
A student asked me on Thursday, “How much does the second place team get? (Because we have an Olympics theme in our summer camp classroom)” and then it clicked in my head that the reason that some kids’ behavior improved since I showed them the dollar bill was that they thought I was going to give them one

Right now I’m just letting it ride but then on the last day, I’ll just tell them I’m a teacher and I have a teachers’ salary so I can’t give them American money and if I don’t end up with stab wounds from pens then I’ll consider that a success

Fun teaching contractions

So some of my students in my class were struggling with the contraction “you’re” and differentiation that from “your” because they would write, “your funny”
So I remembered this one demotivational poster that had Dr. Phil pointing out of the screen and the caption read, “You’re fat, and don’t try and sugarcoat it or you’ll eat that too” so I integrated that into my tutoring session with my kids by showing them difference between “you’re fat” and “your fat” so now they have two phrases that they can now use in everyday life and help them on the road to English fluency (or I’ve just opened up Pandora’s box with the realization, “Oh, I can make fun of people in English and they won’t understand my insults.”)

Not all the students are crazy about me

Although a lot of students like the novelty of having a teacher with blue eyes, one of my students was not too happy with the prospect of me visiting her parents’ house
I texted the parents of this student one night because I wanted to tell them how great a daughter they had because she comes to class every morning an hour before class starts and ready to practice English (of course explaining that my Chinese was terrible in perfect Chinese thanks to the help of my Chinese roommates at summer institute) and the mother texted me back asking if I would like to visit her home.

I said, “Great! Let me just talk to Sarah (the name of the student) tomorrow and I’ll get back in touch with you”
So Sarah has a really really thick Yunnan accent (as most citizens of Yunnan do) and so sometimes I don’t know if she’s talking to me in standard Mandarin Chinese or the local dialect

I spent 15 minutes trying to ask Sarah if she would like her teacher to come to her house and at first it was kind of like a lukewarm “yeah” but in frustration due to our lack of communication she said she actually never wants me to come to her house ever.
I texted the parent saying that, “Sorry, it turns out I have to leave for Guangdong on Saturday” but luckily Sarah is a good kid so she doesn’t need a teacher visiting her house and telling her parents how important English is to actually study English

End of the summer party

So today we celebrated the fact that the summer camp is over and that our class average jumped by 31% from 33% on our diagnostic exam to 64% on the final exam on Thursday

Australia dominated our Olympics with 44 medals and a team average of 74.4% on the final but China made it close with 41 medals and a team average of 72.7% on the final
I feel kind of bad because my class has now moved from failing hard to just barely passing and after reading all of the inspirational stories they tell you about (the exemplar classrooms of Teach for America and Teach for China) you feel like you let your kids down if the class average didn’t go up by 50%-60%

It especially breaks my heart when I ASK THE SAME QUESTION ON 3 DIFFERENT EXAMS AND SOME KIDS STILL GET IT WRONG because you’re just like, “COME ON! DID YOU READ THE CORRECTIONS I SPENT 3 HOURS ON YESTERDAY THAT I WROTE ON YOU AND EVERYONE ELSE’S TEST!”
Some kids did get it right and I'm proud of them for that and I realize that the reason the other kids didn't get it right is my own fault as a teacher so at least instances like these give you a good way to look back and see where you went wrong and where you went right

At least it wasn’t as bad as my roommate who’s teaching physics, his scores from the diagnostic exam to the final improved by a grand total of 0.03%

I was proud of most of my students too

Two of the children that me and Ms. Hanyun went to home visits for over the summer made the biggest gains with 44% and 35%
Then one of our students got a 94% on the final after getting only a 69% on the diagnostic and I realized after the test was over I should have taught her how to “brush the dirt off your shoulder”

So in celebration on Friday we just played games all day
My favorite was during charades when we had Drew go up to the front and he drew the word “China”

So the fellow who teaches with me (Ms. Hanyun) gave the category as “countries” and Drew just pointed at himself
As I was busting my gut laughing it was encouraging to see all 15 of his teammates shoot their hand up in the air saying, “OOH OOH OOH!”

I also liked our version of “Pin The Tail On The Donkey”

Ms. Hanyun had the great idea to draw a face on the chalkboard with a circle around where the nose should be and kids would have to be spun around with their eyes closed and try to find where to put the nose
I could always figure out the kids who weren’t cheating because they would be WAY OFF or fumble around the chalkboard trying to find the chalk-lines of the face

Absolutely no English was learned in this activity but man was it funny

The madness of giving away class posters

My favorite face of the day

You don't know how badly I wanted to teach this kid, "What you talking about Willis?"

This is how engaged every one of my students is for every one of my English classes (the boy in blue not the 10 or so other kids in the background playing games)