Bruce Teaching English In China: 2013/11/4-Find My Keys

This week we played a game called “Find my keys” where we practiced direction words like “left”, “right”, “forward”, “backward”, etc.

I would basically hide my keys, put a sleep mask on a student, and let the student grope his way across the room while his classmates would yell direction words at him like they were obscenities

If I only had 20-30 students in my class then everyone would get a turn being the kid who staggered around the classroom then it would have been great, but because I had 40-50 students in a class I had to find a way to get enough students to participate in it and not turn off the other kids.
Most classes went alright, others didn’t, it just depended on the mood of the class before I got in there (if there was a test in the class before mine then kids were really excited to play-go figure)

My biggest problem was getting kids to not slap the kid wearing the eye mask on the butt

Every time I started a game, there would always be one kid who was bold enough to run out of his seat, run to the kid wearing the eye mask, and slap them on the rear end
This happened with the exception of 2 classes so there’s your childhood psychology lesson of the day

I had a kid poke me in the back with a broom while I wasn’t looking and not on accident either

When I turned around and looked at him, he had a big grin on his face
So I took his schoolbag, told him his parents have to come TONIGHT to my office, apologize to me in front of his parents and recognize what he did was wrong, and that was that

He was crying and begging me for another chance and not to call his dad but the thing was, hitting a teacher with a broom on purpose isn’t exactly something that I’m going to take lightly
I learned that if you let one thing slide, then it really is a slippery slope

I don’t know why Chinese students think that there are no boundaries to touching teachers

I remember a lot of foreign teachers (including me) earlier in the year saying how surprised they were when students would just run up to them and hug them like they were a relative
I remember when I was a kid (especially in elementary school), I wouldn’t dare think of giving my teacher a handshake lest my hand turned into stone

I made the kids sing a song if they wanted to get a piece of candy on Halloween
It was fun because it was the most excitement toward English I’ve seen in a long time at my school (even if was only for the obtainment of my bribe candy)

I had students who only knew how to say, “Good morning” or “Hello” coming up to me and singing “Trick or treat, trick or treat, I want something good to eat” (I had to change it a little bit from “Give me something good to eat” to make it easier to remember

Plus I got to show my good-behaving classes “Thriller” by Michael Jackson in class

Only one student cried, but he was naughty that day and he was the only one of the 45 students in the class who cried

And when I say cried he didn’t actually cry, he just threw a hissy fit that looked like crying because he’s 8 years old and 8 year olds do that
The kids actually really liked the video and I liked it because it gave me an excuse to review last week’s Halloween vocabulary with them

A fire truck with a bunch of interactive games and stuff came to the school in order to teach kids what it was like to be a firefighter and how to prevent themselves from starting a fire in their own house

I remember when I was a kid, the only time a fire truck came to our school was because a 4th grade classmate of mine lit up some firecrackers in the bathroom which I guess was almost as entertaining as it would have been to go inside an interactive fire truck

Bruce Teaching English In China