Classes

This week has been a bit of a paradigm shift for me.

While I had moved past the stage of thinking that teachers lived at school and realized that they were also people long ago, I have never really been in the position of thinking as they might. My role in the classroom has been clearly defined and well honed in my past 17 years of formal education.

Now that world has been turned on its head as I found myself for the first time approaching a classroom not concerned about getting a good grade, but instead wondering how to control a room of 35 students while helping them learn English. Ninety minutes seemed impossibly long as I thought of standing in front of a group of Chinese students and teaching them. What do I really know about teaching? I've seen teachers in their element, but does that parlay into knowing how to teach?

This was further complicated by not yet knowing what classes I would be teaching. It is apparently the Chinese way to give teachers schedules and textbooks at the last minute. I was lucky enough to get three or four days notice since students at our school did not start classes until September 7. We arrived in Zhanjiang on Saturday, September 7. Some teachers had classes on Monday, September 3.

Thankfully Maryknoll had given us all a suggested lesson plan for our first class. It got the students involved in asking the teachers questions about themselves and then for the second half of class, suggests having the students pair up and introduce each other to the class.

This worked fairly well in two of my classes, where the students are English majors and speak and understand English fairly well. My Third class students are Accounting majors and their level of English is much lower, which made things a little bit rocky at first. After slowing down a bit, things went a little better.

This semester, I will be teaching 12 hours of class per week. I have three different classes and will have each of them twice (four hours total) per week. My subjects will cover Reading, Listening and Speaking (Oral English).