(No I haven't had actual problems breathing, and I'm pretty sure I'm not developing pneumonia. I'm just getting a little bogged down by a lot of the busy work I need to do for my lessons.)
When I graduated college I had only one semester of student-teaching Biology under my belt, but I felt I knew enough to be an effective first-year Biology teacher. I knew the subject, the curriculum requirements, and several methods by which I could impart information in a meaningful way.
Teachers as a whole usually have similar methodologies, even among different subjects, but having to transpose my experience of American high school science classrooms to Chinese university language classrooms was no easy task and it's still a challenge.
What's more, I lack a number of traits that are present in most of my fellow teachers:
- 1 - experience, most of them have years of it, I have next to none. (Youngest on the faculty.)
- 2 - subject familiarity, I speak English fluently, but there's a difference between knowing how to use a skill yourself and truly understanding its intricacies enough to impart that skill to others.
- 3 - empathy for learners, I want my students to succeed and be able to guide their own learning, but I don't know the depth of what they know or the places wherein they're lacking.
I'm not the only one having problems though. Benja and I have both had to endure some rather harsh criticism from our students about the slow pace and simple language that we're teaching. While it's nice to know that the students have the gumption to speak their minds and let us know their thoughts and feelings it would be nice if they did so with a little more tact.
One of my students sent me a text saying "I don't know what I can learn from this class" after I gave a rather boring lesson. I told her "thank you" for telling me her level of English understanding, but it was still pretty hurtful.
So now the both of us are going to rework our courses - the students seem to think they're above the things we're teaching, so we'll treat them like such. We'll act is if they know all they seem to think they know and test them as if they do. If they really are as hot as they seem to think they are then they should do fine, if not then hopefully it'll be a wake-up call for them to get wise to all the simple facets of English that they don't know and be patient.
Besides that I'm still staying active. I expect I'll go hiking with the Crazy English Club again this weekend, and in the meantime my college (瓯江) is hosting a track meet for which I'm signed up to run the longest race they offer (1500 m) on Sunday (if only it was Matt instead of me). Shelley tells me I'll be the first foreign teacher to do this - though I wish I were in better running shape, I haven't run a race since high school, and most of my exercise in this country so far has been Qigong, bicycling and hiking.
...Oh and Matt you'll get a kick out of this: all of the teachers I asked about the meet say they don't know the times of their races and events! (I only learned mine because I kept asking the secretary)
Thursday, October 16, 2008
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