Bruce Teaching English In China: December 2013

Saturday, December 14, 2013

So during last week's oral English competition, I found out that my first grade students don't understand letters

The first thing they learn in English is "A-B-C-D-E..."but to them it's just a song and few kids actually grasp the fact that "Oh, this is something that would be helpful to actually put into practice when learning English"
I had so many kids confuse the word "dance" with the name of a character in their textbook ("Danny"), that I once told a kid in frustration, "Danny is dead!"
Out of the 55 or so kids that I tested, only 1 pronounced dance as dance and not Danny

So this week I taught them how to answer the question, "How do you spell (insert English word here)?"

I can't tell you how many kids pronounced "i" as "e" because in Chinese phonics, that's how i is pronounced
Then there was the case where a few students pronounced "j" as "g" but luckily there weren't that many of those kind of kids
Then there's the letters that Chinese doesn't have like "x" and "v" where some of the kids just completely blanked on

They would be reading the word so fast and then I knew when they blanked because they would just stop like they saw Brad Pitt walking down the street
Me:"How do you spell 'cardboard box'?"

I'm going to Taiwan and Hong Kong next week for vacation so I had to change some classes around in order to make up for my missed classes (we get December 24th and 25th off for Christmas as Shenzhen foreign teachers which is extremely nice)

One of the classes I had to teach was a Chinese language teacher's class and normally I would have just taught them English because, that's my job, but I HAD to give them a powerpoint presentation on water safety so I taught them about water safety in Chinese

It was actually really easy, I just read the powerpoint presentation character-by-character with them

It's really humbling when a 6 or 7-year old first grade student knows a Chinese character you don't

"Sorry kid, I'm not Chinese, let's see you read Macbeth and see how well you do (sticks out tongue)"

Then there was the part where the screen was a little bit out of adjustment, and that all important "don't" word wasn't on the screen for students to see

"So everyone, read with me, 'push and pull children into dangerous...' wait what?"

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

My favorite part about it was when a student would ask, "Why doesn't China have a thanksgiving?" and I would reply with, "because Chinese people don't like to say thank you." (which is completely true by the way)
I think that most of the kids forgot the Thanksgiving food words I taught them (with the exception of "Turkey") but at least they'll remember the pictures of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade

I remember when I was in 3rd grade there was a woman who came to my elementary school from Japan and taught us all about Japanese culture
Now I get to do her job every day and boy is it a great feeling

Basically, I would say "Find a word on page 8 that starts with the letter X" and all of the kids would frantically turn to page 8 and try to find a word that started with the letter X

The funniest parts always came when one kid would just be so proud of himself, find the word that started with the letter I wanted it to start with, but...they would be on the wrong page
Then there was always the student who just didn't get the whole, "start with..." part and would always find a word that had the letter in it, but not start with the letter...eh

December 20th is the magic date when I should know which business school I'll be indebted to for the next 20 years will be

All joking aside, I'm really, really anxious and the sooner it comes, the better