The Classroom and Teaching

First semester, I had a sweet schedule. Yeah... sweet! I use that word sometimes.

Not really.. but.. um.. it fits here.

One class consists of a forty-five minute period, a ten minute break, and another forty-five minute period. I had two classes Monday, one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, one on Thursday, and two on Friday. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, classes didn't start until 2:30pm.

And that means... sleeping in, right?

YEAH!

First day of class - Monday afternoon - I walked into my first classroom. I was a little nervous. My experiences from the previous year had me worrying about classroom management before classes even started... but a veteran teacher colleague of mine told me not to worry about it at all. The hard part isn't in stopping the students from chitchatting - it's in getting them to open their mouths.

They're learning English after all - and many students are, for the most part, too nervous to speak in class. I was warned that after their initial curiosity about the foreign teacher fades in the first week or two, student participation drops.

Other than that, I didn't really know what to expect.

Neither did my students. First off - all of their schedules said that their foreign English teacher would be named 'John.' My name isn't John. As a matter of fact, I don't look like a foreign teacher. I don't even look old enough to be a teacher.

So when I walked into class... all the students stared at me in confusion.

[i]What.. is she doing? Why is she walking up to the front of the classroom? Why is she looking at us? Why... why..[/i]

And then a collective "Ooooooh!" goes through the classroom when I open my mouth.

"Oh! We thought you were a student!"

"Wait. You're a teacher?"

"Where are you from?"

"You don't sound British. You must be American!"

"What? Why do you look Chinese?"

"Oh... wait... I don't understand."

"You're ABC!" (said one overenthusiastic student in one class).

"You're the first ABC I've ever met!"

American Born Chinese. ABC. And I'd nod, brows raised. Yes. Yes I am. This continued all week long with every one of my classes. In one of my classes, one of my students even tried to explain to me that I was lost and in the wrong classroom.

I had fun though.

And it is much much easier teaching the same lesson throughout the course of one week. I feel a little bad for my Monday students because they have the roughest version of my weekly lesson presented to them. Tuesday is pretty good. By Friday, I could give the lesson blindfolded.

Another thing I learned? Having time to think is amazing. Even my Monday lessons got better over time because I had time to stop and think about what was working and what wasn't working. I know this seems intuitive... but this was something that I couldn't do before - simply because I didn't have the time to rest.

Rest helps.

And... once again, thanks to my experiences last year and to all the teachers that I worked with, I found that I could suddenly explain things much better. Instructions and directions - something that I had trouble with before - was something that I could suddenly do without a hitch. Explaining things to Chinese students in their second language is difficult - mainly because I need to use language that they can understand.

Other interesting things about the classroom:

Students stand up when I call on them to speak. I've told them that they don't need to stand up in my classroom, mainly because I wanted to give them a sense of what an American classroom is like. Classes that have had other foreign teachers before stopped standing up almost immediately. Classes that didn't... it took them a couple weeks to stop completely. I think many of my students weren't sure how to behave around me - do they treat me like a foreign teacher? Or should they treat me like a Chinese teacher?

I had an in-depth discussion about this (standing up when talking) with my Chinese tutor. Standing up is a sign of respect, she said. If the teacher is standing at the front of the classroom, the student should stand to address her. If the teacher is walking among the students, standing is not as important. If the teacher is sitting - and usually only foreign teachers sit down, it seems (and WOAH! We sit down on top of desks! My students think that this is funny) - it's definitely ok to answer while sitting.

None of this is set in stone, of course. The student just uses their judgment and try and figure out how to address their teacher. Who I am - my age, my status as teacher, my ethnicity, and even my sex has an impact on the way that my students act around me. The fact that I am a foreigner makes my students nervous... but the fact that I am Chinese makes them more comfortable around me, I think, than they are at first with the other foreign teachers.

Anyway, that's it for now. I think I'm going to take a nap..