How to Teach in China

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”

― Benjamin Franklin

There are many methods for teaching but not all of them are equal.  My time in China has taught me that the main stream education system employs a certain set of techniques.  This usually involves: repetition, textbooks, and memorization for examinations.  Young college students often have 10 years of English teaching before they even reach the college level.  However, they are far from literate.  So often the ones charged to teach the students English are in and of themselves inadequate for the task.  Their pronunciation is poor and their verbal skills are lacking.  This isn’t necessarily their fault.  Many of them are trying the best they can with what they have.  It’s often a matter of inadequate resources.  That’s why true English speakers are a highly prized commodity.  However, just because teachers, like me, can speak English fluently doesn’t mean that we necessarily know how to teach.  Thus, why I am writing today’s blog.  Almost two years of teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) in American alongside one-and-half years of teaching Chinese students in China has taught me a few things.  I want to share them with you now.  

1. “They can talk!” (Uncovering Hidden Skills)

10 years of memorization and reciting English lessons from cassette tapes has buried a lot of knowledge in these young Chinese students.  Their lack of proper verbal communicating is not from a lack of knowledge so much as it is from experience.  Often students are crippled with shyness.  This is especially true when speaking with a foreigner.  I’ve seen so many quivering lips when having a simple conversation with my students.  They’re scared of screwing up.  The first responsibility of a foreign teacher is to make the students feel comfortable.  One way I will accomplish this task is by moving around the classroom and speaking with the students face-to-face.  I try to gather their attention directly on me and not on speaking out in front of the whole classroom of their peers.  My goal is to help them feel like they are talking just to me.  So I engage them in very much the same way someone would in a one-on-one conversation.  They appreciate this.  Sometimes I even pull out a chair and simply invite them to have a free-conversation with me.  This is where I let them talk to me about whatever they want to talk about.  Sometimes only one student will join me for a free-chat and other times I’ll have a group of 12+ who want to join in.  They all gather in a circle and we just simply talk.

 

2. “They can act!” (Roleplaying for Safety)

Another great way to help the students feel more comfortable about speaking is to give them a mask to hide behind.  Roleplaying and dramas allow for students to become another character and to speak freely as that character.  In their imaginations they are someone else and the process of their character losing face isn’t detrimental to their personal loss of face.  The character acts like a protective shield.  In fact, a character being foolish can produces humor, which in turn increases the personal charisma of a student.  I’ve seen this manifest in some pretty funny scenarios.  In one class, there were four boys acting out a relationship drama.  The drama was about a young girl who was bringing home a surprise boyfriend to meet her parents.  The mother was supposed to be less than happy about this as her objective in the drama was to convince the young daughter to focus on her studies rather than on a boyfriend.  So the four boys played the parts of the daughter, mother, father, and the boyfriend.  They hammed it up good!  The daughter was hugging her boyfriend tightly and ogling over his muscles, the boyfriend was flexing his muscles and claiming that love is all that matter because he was so poor, the mother was busy waving a frying pan around and chasing the young man out of the house, and the father was too busy reading a newspaper to even care.  It was hilarious! 

3. “You like me. You really like me!”  (Becoming Friends with the Students)

As a young man of 28, I find myself barely more than a few years older than my students.  Being that some students even wait a few years before going to college makes the age gap even less.  So a young teacher can become like a big sibling to most of these young men and women.  College life in China is very different from America.  The students do not have easy means to transportation and very few of them have any extra spending money.  The campuses aren’t littered with cars, like they are in America.  Students live in the dorms.  Their life is often limited to getting on the internet, playing basketball, or just hanging out with friends in a cold empty classroom.  There are no social hangout spots.  Hua Hang has even fewer external restaurants for students to go than the Teacher’s University.  It’s a pretty desolate place.  So many of them are bored.  But they are also really nice and really fun people.  So I will go and play with them.  Sometimes that means eating with them in the cafeteria, taking a group to a coffee house to play cards, playing football on the sports field, or just taking a walk around the campus and talking.  It’s the friendship with Chinese students that really makes teaching her worth so much.

4. The Rewards (Give a Little, Take a Little)

Most students are timid about asking a teacher to be their friend.  However, most are also eager to have a teacher as their friend.  One practical reason for having an American teacher as a friend is that the student can regularly practice their English.  This goes both ways as an American teacher can also practice their Chinese.  There isn’t a day that goes by where I’m not asking a Chinese student to teach me some Chinese.  I’ll pull out my little notebook and I’ll ask them to teach me a new phrase.  They’ll eagerly write it down and teach me how to say it properly.  (Showing an effort to learn Chinese is a great way to earn the respect of the students.)  Having Chinese students as friends is almost a requirement for survival.  Just last week I needed to get my haircut and I didn’t know where to go.  I didn’t know where any of the barbershops where near Hua Hang.  So I posted a comment on QQ (China’s version of facebook) that I needed some help.  I had several students offering their services.  One of my students, named Ren Fei, took me the following morning to a street filled with barbershops.  We passed nearly thirteen different shops before at last coming to the “right one.”  Ren Fei told the hairdresser what I wanted and the young man set to work.  I’m always nervous about getting my haircut because it doesn’t always turn out well in the end.  But, this young man did an excellent job.  It was the best haircut I ever had in China.  I was doubly surprised when I found out that Ren Fei had actually paid for my haircut while I was in the chair.  I objected to this gesture of kindness but she wouldn’t hear of it.  So, I got her back by treating her to a cup of warm milk tea at the local coffees shop.

 

5. Adventure Buddies (Travelling with Students)

Sometimes a teacher will get surprised by an invitation from a student to travel.  I find it to be quite an honor to be asked to travel with my students.  They are often going to places together as a group of friends and they don’t need me to tag along.  But, they want me to come along because they view me as one of their friends.  So, I have been invited to many places in China and I almost nearly accept every invitation.  One of the latest invitations I received was to hiking a famous mountain in Beijing called the Fragrant Hills Park (Xiangshan Park; Chinese: 香山公园; pinyin: Xiāngshān Gōngyuán).  The Fragrant Hills, or more commonly called, “Xiangshan,” is a large mountain park with an enormous Buddhist Temple.  The temple is open to visitors and there arer many paths up the mountain for hiking and exploring.  I was asked to go there with a group of students but several of the students ended up getting sick that morning with food poisoning.  Thus I ended up only traveling with one student named Taylor.  We weren’t going to let a few missing comrades ruin our trip!  So we hopped on the train from Langfang up to Beijing, then we hopped on the subway to the North of the city, and then lastly we hopped on a bus to the mountain.  It took us almost 4 hours of travel just to reach the base of the mountain.  We visited the temple first as it is the first stop on the mountain hike.  I was amazed at how big this thing was.  It was built more like a castle than a temple.  There were seven courtyards, towers, moats, and even a built in waterfall.  Inside each courtyard was a massive pagoda housing any number of gods.  There was one pagoda that housed one hundred life-sized bronze statues of famous monks.  It was quite a sight to see!  After visiting the temple, Taylor and I made our way up the mountain.  It took us nearly two hours to reach the summit, but it was worth the hike.  We stood on the lookout and surveyed the valley below.  It was a somewhat foggy day so the view wasn’t the best.  But it was overcoming the mountain that made us both feel good.