Bruce Teaching English In China: Summer Institute Orientation

Summer Institute Orientation

So our first task for orientation was to practice engaging the community by ourselves (we 130 or so fellows split off into groups of 10) and from our reflection groups we had to go out one-by-one with whatever Chinese skills we had and try to connect with people

Some people talked about “Where did you come from?”, “Why are you here in Lincang?” and they had really deep meaningful conversations where I just asked where the nearest post office was so I could buy some stamps but at least I tried to do it as nicely as possible
I like the story of our Program Manager (the people from TFC who leads our reflection group) who said that she just took out her laptop and talked to the guy using google translate

So after we got back and had a really good free lunch compliments of TFC working out an agreement with the University, we sat down in the auditorium and heard past teachers from TFC and students who were taught by TFC teachers speak

I learned that the best way to have bilingual meetings is to have the speaker talk in their native tongue and then on a powerpoint slide in the background have the translation in another language because that’s the way TFC did it and it added a lot more impact and the story was more fluid
The kids were the best because they told stories about how their class started with like 40 kids and by the end of the year it whittled down to 23

The kids say that some of the kids dropping out actually had to do with teachers taking the kids aside and telling the kids that, “Hey listen, you’re not going to do very well if you keep going on so you might as well drop out and go home”

It was kind of hard to believe the story from one of the past Chinese fellow teachers about how this happened to her friend who dropped out and became a mushroom farmer like his dad because she said she kept up with him over QQ and I just thought that if he’s a poor mushroom farmer who can’t afford a house how can he afford a laptop and the time to go talk to old pals on QQ?

You started to get the feeling that, “Man I made the right decision after college to try and eradicate educational inequality” because all the stories were so personal
There was a story from one of the recruiters about how her grandpa who lived in rural China decades ago decided to take the place of the recruiter’s great-uncle to move to Vietnam (and eventually to the US) and that meant that the recruiter’s family now has so much opportunity and all of her close relatives have high school or college degrees whereas the part of the family that stayed back in rural China only has about 1 out of 9 members with a high school diploma and most of them have to work jobs that they don’t want to work at to make ends meet because those are the only jobs available.

Now if someone wants to ask if there’s a simple answer to something I can use the TFC response and say, “There’s no silver bullet but there is a silver buckshot”

They said that I’ll know what region I’ll be placed in by next weekend and that by the end of Summer Institute I’ll know where I will be placed with a definite address

The reason they say that it takes so long is that that’s just the Chinese way of handling things where last minute changes seemed to pop up
TFC wants it to be where you get to your placement site as early as possible but in the past there have been problems where all of a sudden a school won’t need a TFC teacher which really puts people in a bind

But at least they give us a little bit of time before we land in our placement region to relax a little bit after Summer Institute so that’s nice

So Teach for China worked out a summer camp (because summer schools where kids fail and take remedial classes over the summer are illegal in China) and all of us fellows get to teach for 40 minutes a day

May the Lord have mercy on my poor students’ souls
Hopefully I’ll have a cool English class because basically I want to do more games and moving around then anything and I think that’s what TFC is after based on how they made the Chinese way of having to recite large amounts of information as bad

So in our reflection groups we had this activity where we had to tell our life story and why we joined TFC in 6 minutes

I spent 3 minutes telling my story and I did a pretty bad job but I got the point across that I was here to help and not find a wife or anything bad like that

Then we had to do an activity where we all put a word or phrase on a piece of paper that described what we wanted our group to be like in discussion, throw it in the middle of the circle, and then we had to pick a piece of paper that we didn’t write

A poor Chinese fellow picked it up and started with, “Yeah I picked this word bret…brep…brevity and I didn’t know what it meant so I looked it up and…”
My favorite was when someone pointed out the fact that my word and some of the other responses like, “talk freely” and “listen patiently to others” contradicted my response (no one knew that I wrote “brevity”)

Bruce Teaching English In China