My own self-esteem took a battering between afternoon lessons. I had a bit of a wobbly tummy and had to rush to the school toilet. Staff and students share the same block - a series of holes in the ground with no partitions, let alone cubicles! Now, the sight of a foreigner in your school is enough for stares in itself, but a squatting foreigner trying to keep his balance amidst the filth is simply too much to miss, and I managed to attract a crowd of 10-15 gawking boys as I did my business! I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me …until I remembered what lay beneath!
Another in my occasional series of "Flashbacks" looking back at blog entries made before this Weebly version started. The final destination on my tour of remote countryside schools was LongJie (Dragon Street) Middle School. It’s very poor. The photo shows a typical dormitory - 12 students living in a room the size of my kitchen. As usual, the day started with 2-3 hours in the car, then observing 2 lessons and giving feedback. After lunch, I did 2 model lessons and an hour’s training. Then supper and 2-3 hours onward journey. The observed lessons today couldn’t have been more different. The first was a new teacher, with the English name “Shrimp” (!?). She was teaching a Grade 1 class - students who had been learning English for just a week. Shrimp’s English is excellent and she kept it simple and clear. The students eagerly volunteered to come to the front to recite simple greeting dialogues and copied down new letters of the alphabet into their notebooks. The second lesson was from a more experienced teacher called “Ryan”. 90% of it was conducted in Chinese, and it involved the teacher, and later the students, drawing various things on the board and on paper. I was trying to work out the point of it all (with my limited Chinese) right until the bell finally rang and the lesson was over. The other teachers observing the class with me also left very confused. One asked me, “Was that an Art lesson or an English lesson?”. I managed to catch Ryan alone later, but when I asked him about the lesson he suddenly started crying! Once composed, he told me he had planned a lesson from the textbook, but changed his mind at the last minute and decided to try an idea he had read in a newspaper!? The other English teachers had apparently criticised him after the lesson and he now wanted to apologise to me! I ditched my planned feedback about “Teaching Aims” and “Lesson Plans” and tried to encourage him instead. I commended his willingness to try new teaching ideas(!), his bravery in letting others watch the experiment(!!) and assured him that for every failed idea there’s a successful one (right??).
My own self-esteem took a battering between afternoon lessons. I had a bit of a wobbly tummy and had to rush to the school toilet. Staff and students share the same block - a series of holes in the ground with no partitions, let alone cubicles! Now, the sight of a foreigner in your school is enough for stares in itself, but a squatting foreigner trying to keep his balance amidst the filth is simply too much to miss, and I managed to attract a crowd of 10-15 gawking boys as I did my business! I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me …until I remembered what lay beneath! Comments are closed.
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AuthorPaul Hider lives and works in Kunming (SW China) and regularly updates this blog about his life there. Past blog entries
April 2024
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