Friday night ramblings

Jean-Jacques' green bean mustache

Though difficult to believe, it’s Friday again. Strangely, this week was both short and long. I feel like it should be Friday, but the days seemed to pass quickly. 


My two periods this morning went fairly smoothly. As I’ve mentioned before, some of the students are a little less enthusiastic to attend my class, and have a difficult time being motivated to work on assignments I give. I’ll simply have to step up my discipline a bit. 


This year has definitely helped my classroom management skills. Not only do I have large classes, but many of them don’t speak English very well, are not used to focusing their entire attention on a teacher, keep breaking the same rules (are they testing me to see if I’ll respond differently the seven hundredth time I see a student using a cell phone?), and don’t receive a grade in my class. Plus, the course doesn’t directly help them prepare for the national college entrance examinations, which can be disastrous for me since I’m working in an extrinsically motivated education system. 


Our experience so far has shown us that the English taught here is very different from the English that Americans, English, Scottish, Welsh, South Africans, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, or Irish use. We’ve discovered that in China, English has become another subject that’s used to test the students’ abilities to answer multiple choice questions. It’s not a creative or fluid subject, with all the complexities that make sense to us. (Example: think of all the different ways you can respond to the greeting, “How are you?”. In Anqing, the only response is this: “I’m fine, sanks.”) English in China has almost been reduced to a mathematical problem that makes sense on paper (if you think about it creatively), but would never be used in a real world circumstance. (Who says that a dish is “mouth-watering and delicious” or “I’m going to relax myself this weekend”?)  For Chinese students, English has become robotic. Here’s a sentence, fill in the correct word from a multiple choice list. Conjugate the highlighted word to fit the sentence. 


Sorry for the detour into EssayTown, which is conveniently located in RantLand. I’ll return to my original story. My students need to be reminded of their responsibilities in my class and I will make it clear to them next week. Sometimes I feel bi-polar because one moment I’m stern Mrs. Têtu who-must-firmly-discipline-a-student and then in the next second I become enthusiastic Mrs. Têtu who-is-bouncing-around-the-room-while-explaining-the-meaning-of-“brag”. It seems to work, though. Maybe I am so unpredictable that I shock the students into paying attention.


I was surprised when sixteen students showed up to my Friday Movie Lunch. Normally I have around five to seven students, so I wasn’t expecting such an impressive turnout. We had fun watching the movie Cars and I only had to stop the movie a few times to explain the plot. 


After I returned home from the Movie Lunch, I crawled into bed and spent most of the afternoon there in a comfortable, but semi-comatose state (or semi-awake state, depending on your world view). Jean-Jacques cooked dinner while I kept him company, we watched the latest episode of The Amazing Race, and we’re in the middle of this week’s Castle. I say in the middle because we had to pause the show to use the bathroom in shifts (that's a plural, mind you). I think our lunch of spicy noodles wasn’t the kindest on our tummies. 


Until tomorrow...