Ah yes. The thing I came to Harbin to do: teach English. I have now completed 3 weeks of classes and am officially a laoshi or teacher. Seven times a week I teach the same 2-hour class to about 25 to 30 students each time. In total I have almost 200 delightful students each with a beautiful Chinese name I am attempting (!*!) to memorize and learn to say in a way that is at least somewhat near to correct. It's a wonderful sort of disaster that only remains bearable with lots of laughs and forgiving patience!
The course I teach is designed to improve the listening and speaking skills for students learning English as most of them can read and write very well but when it comes to the more productive (listening and speaking) aspects of the language they are less confident and able. My job is to get them speaking. Easy right?
Well, in some ways. The greatest blessing so far in my arrival to Harbin is that this course is already planned out! Megan, an English teacher from Arkansas who has been here for a year already, is teaching the exact same course and she has all the lesson plans, worksheets and overheads for the whole semester. YES! They are done and all I have to do is look over them, figure out how to make sense of what I say and do and copy off the worksheets to hand out! The hard part comes only when I step into class each morning.
So there I am four mornings a week; walking over to the building, scurrying up the steps to gather the little plastic box with a key to open the computer and a remote to turn on the projector (the rooms are fully equipped), then stepping into the corner room full of large windows partially covered by dusty drapes and solid long wooden desks. Usually I arrive about five minutes before and the class is already there; studying, chatting softly, and (yep) basically just waiting for me. It is all rather awkward still and oddly frightening. It is considered quite a privilege to have a native English speaker as your teacher, which creates quite a celebratory sort of gap that I have yet to really break down. (Hopefully that will come with time.) Yet, I have definitely settled into a nice routine which is much more comfortable to me than that first week of teaching. It was crazy! Trying to get everyone's names, figure out who is supposed to be in the class, being too soft and allowing several auditing students (grrr), trying to explain all the policies and such in a simple slow sort of way and probably failing miserably, since I tend to talk fast when I get excited. Of course, things still don't quite gel all the time and I have many lessons to learn. Many.
My respect and awe of those in teaching positions grows by the minute…
No comments:
Post a Comment