I told myself that I’d never be an English teacher in China.  It just seems that most every foreigner in China is an English teacher.  So, not wanting to be like the average foreigner in China, I simply said that I wouldn’t teach English, even though I enjoy teaching.  When Davide‘s wife first asked me to teach at her fledgling English school, I declined saying that I was too busy (true!).

But, when she sent me a desperate text message saying that a teacher had canceled at the last minute (a common problem among those bums), what could I say?  So, I showed up and winged a class.  Turns out it was a lot of fun and quite easy.  There wasn’t much more to do than just talk, ask them to repeat, and correct pronunciation.  OK, a little more than that, but still easy if you’re willing to be a bit of an actor and have a good time with the kids, there’s really nothing to it.

The kids can be totally rambunctious, much wilder than western kids.  And the parents, who enjoy watching too, will usually not do anything.  When they do scowl at the kids, the rebuke only has effect for maybe one minute.  However, the last class that I taught (a duo of the better English speakers), one of the girls just would not behave at all.  Her mom happened to be inside the office.  After telling the girl to sit down and behave for the 25th time, I stood up and knocked on the door.  The kids immediately got quiet.  I told the mom to have a talk with her daughter and tell her to behave.  Well, the end result was a fit of crying and I had to teach the remainder of the class as a 1:1.  Oh yeah, and because that disruption was so big, I felt like I needed to improvise a game.  So, I came up with sort of a charades game:  We took turns drawing on the whiteboard.  The other person would think of an animal or object and describe it.  The other would draw it.  The result was often funny.  I’m only able to do this game with this one student, who lived in Toronto for a while.  Impossible for the other students.

Most of their English ability is deceptively bad.  They have a decent amount of vocabulary, but when I got bold in one class and suggested that we started working on basic sentences, I was shocked at how hard this was for them.  Sentences like, “Are you awake?” and “I’m going to school.” took a lot of effort!  I wonder how they’re teaching English in the native schools?  Guess I’ll learn more about all this as I go along.

Oh, here’s another interesting thing, our classroom is in an apartment that’s been converted into a school.  This is quite common in China.  There’s some sort of after-school school being conducted in an apartment on the first floor of my building.  Not sure the legality of this (I suspect there’s no issue with it), but this is quite common.  There’s an old lady in an apartment under the school that I teach at who periodically complains about the shouting kids.  Can’t say I blame her.  They do love to shout.

Here’s a shot right before class.  Normally, there are five students in this class: