3rd week of waiting to be placed in a school

Third Week of Month Long Planning

l  English Corner with 1^st graders

n  So on Monday we had an after-school session with 1^st graders and it was by far the most fun experience I’ve had with Chinese kids trying to teach them English

n  We (me and my partner) were given some really good advice beforehand

u  Explain what you’re going to do slowly in 3 different ways and don’t check for understanding because they still won’t get it

u  Be prepared for everyone needing to go to the bathroom at the exact same time

u  Only play games with them (which we learned is true because as soon as we started to play a game the other groups of first graders in our vicinity stopped paying attention to their teachers and focused on us)

l  Plus, when we were playing duck-duck-goose not only were some parents watching us but 8^th graders stopped playing basketball and started to watch us play

n  Assume they are a blank piece of paper and know absolutely nothing

u  We weren’t expecting that 1^st graders (after their first exposure to the English language was a week ago) can recite Shakespeare’s sonnets but it was good to explicitly state that

u  Plus we were playing a game of throw the ball at the water bottle where if a person answered the English question right they got to throw a ball at a water bottle (such a good motivation tool) and I would call on somebody, they would blank, their friends would yell and scream at them and they still wouldn’t be able to tell me the answer even though their friends were completely right.

n  Also, if all else fails, teach them how to Crank Dat Soulja Boy

u  The kids ate it up and it really did make the English Corner a really enjoyable experience

l  Class observation on Tuesday and Wednesday

n  We got a chance to see second year fellows in action and think two things

u  1. Wow, I can be a pretty good teacher after a year of experience

u  2. We want to teach so bad!!!!!

n  Every time I was in a class I just wanted to be the teacher even though I had no idea what the lesson was supposed to be about

u  I would have went up there and taught them the Canadian national anthem, just as long as I got a chance to teach I would have been so happy

n  I just hope that whenever I get my placement school, I get to teach an Oral English class

u  Think of Oral English like this, there’s no tests, no pressure, you just teach kids songs and conversations

l  Is it babysitting instead of teaching-kind of.

l  Is it awesome and really fun-YEAH!

l  Triangles aren’t bad

n  We had a session on uncovering our biases and how circles think triangles are “stupid, ugly, and bad, bad, bad”

n  Then we got to pick the secretary, salesman, and vice-president of an organization based solely on their pictures

u  We were a little sexist with ours because we chose a really good looking woman to be our saleswoman because our (3 guys) rationale was that anyone will buy something from a pretty woman

l  Unit Planning

n  Basically we have to look at the mid-terms and finals of the previous year and derive our own curriculum from that because the Guangdong government wants us to teach to the test

u  Of course, you have to love how a mid-term tests on colors even though the mid-term is printed in black and white so it’s kind of hard to expect kids to identify a certain shade of grey as purple

n  Because we’re stuck in limbo, we have enough time to plan out our entire semester and they wanted us to plan out the second unit of our textbooks but then they told us that it’s not likely we’ll be placed until after it’s expected we (or the substitute teacher holding our place) should have already covered it

l  English Corner with 5^th Graders

n  So we had a group of 5 fifth grade boys (because two girl TFC fellows stole our girls and replaced them with their boys while we weren’t looking) and we had a blast

u  My favorite part came when the girl TFC fellows that stole our original girls challenged us to an Angry English contest where we would see which group had the best insults for the other

n  We (me and my partner) accepted the challenge and we devastated the competition

u  Those girl TFC fellows didn’t know that I happened to have my “Dirty Chinese” book with me (I have it just in case I’m bored on a bus and I want to strike up a conversation with someone sitting next to me)

u  So I taught my boys, “You look like a pig” because it actually is a helpful sentence to know in case they’re in America and they’re trying to describe something pig-shaped but they don’t know the right English word

u  Then we taught them, “You are a/an {fill in the blank}” because they should already know “You are an American” so it was just for review purposes

l  We didn’t teach them any actual swear words, just words like psycho, half-wit, etc.

n  Then the competition came and I was so proud of my boys

u  It was kind of like what it would have been like watching Napoleon’s troops take on the Prussians (controlled chaos vs. nice order)

l  The girls literally lined up 2x2 and they’re TFC fellows had to coach them on how to insult the boys while my boys just let it fly all by themselves, they didn’t need my help at all.

l  It really made me believe in the Teaching as Leadership framework of teaching where you teach someone through “I do, we do, you do” practice

n  We won hands down

u  The girls didn’t even know what to say because the boys were just coming in from all directions

u  I learned later that they wanted to say, “You are like a delicate flower and we will squash you” but when you’re dealing with guerilla warfare (especially from fifth grade boys), you can’t afford to wait very long to attack

u  I had so much fun

l  The woman TFC fellows were aghast…which made me just revel in our victory even more

l  I have to make a visa run

n  Because our school placements are being delayed, my visa is about to expire so I get to go to Hong Kong this weekend to get another 90 days on my tourist visa

u  One fellow had the idea of just having a blog post that said, “Placements” and a self-portrait of them with the Hong Kong skyline behind them

n  At least morale is relatively high (compared to what it could be)

u  Everyone is keeping themselves busy preparing for our future placement sites, talking about how excited we are when we actually get children to give English (or Ancient Greek God) names to, etc.