The Oath

Higher-level English students should know better, and I’m sick and tired of my Level 3 class and their unnecessary Chinese. It’s just lazy or rebellious, and I don’t approve of either of those behaviors. So I showed them how serious I was today. I made them take an oath, and English-speaking oath.

I lined up all of my students outside and stood at the door with thick children’s dictionary in my hands. Each student had to lay their right hand on the dictionary and repeat these words after me:

“I, ________, hereby swear that I will only speak English in this classroom.”

The jokesters were sent to the back of the line until they took it seriously. There was definitely a higher sense of awareness about the language being spoken in the classroom after that. I think I may have them do a written oath that they all sign. This would be displayed on the wall and a memo about it would go home to all the parents.

It’s funny, because I have swiveled back and forth between a liberal and staunch position about Chinese in the classroom. It literally comes in mood swings for me. And this semester, I’m in an English mood! A staunch and strict one at that!

On a lighter note, I went in to work early today for a lunch meeting with the cram school’s CEO. It was a good meeting. The branch I work at is on overhaul this semester because from the business side of things numbers aren’t looking too hot. So we’re all working together to improve the situation. I really appreciate being a part of this process and am finding myself putting in more work than I would on a normal day. There’s something extremely gratifying about working for a company that calls upon their employees in times of trouble. I’m not  dispensable; we’re actually all significant pieces of a puzzle that make this whole machine run forward.

BigByte definitely gets the nomination for the morale-boosting award.

Enforcing an English-only policy in my classroom even when I myself have to fight the Chinese that’s become so naturally for me to say makes me think of parenting. (Parents, please correct me if I’m wrong!) In spite of the complaints and sassy attitudes of the children, and as annoying as that can be to put up with for the adult, there IS a reason for all of it. This is where the role of age enters the stage: the adult sees what the child does not.

So I will continue to be staunch and strict about English being the only language spoken in my classroom. Because I see what my students do not (the meetings, the money, the parent-school relations, the project planning, the curriculum and test writing). They just wouldn’t get it. And that’s OK, because they’re freaking kids!

first day back

Today was the first day back after Chinese New Year Vacation. It was the first day of school in the Year of the Snake. SSSSSSsssssssssssSSS!!! The ssssssssspring ssssemesssssster hasssss begun! (Like that alliterative snake-hiss effect? Wait, I just removed the impact by asking you that, didn’t I. Crap.)

I immediately discovered that there can no such thing as fun first day back with my students. I started off (out of necessity of course) with an iron fist, lecturing them about the wrongs they committed last semester and how they SHALL NOT commit them again. “It’s a new year, a new semester, children! You will speak MORE English and be NICER people! Be BETTER than you were last year!” 

The timeout chair was initiated and re-introduced almost right away. I had a student erase pictures of yucky things he was drawing (butts, boobs, butts and boobs pooping) and sent him into time out. He was quite taken back, but the punishment was clear and will be EVER SO SEVERE should I catch him at it again.

I had my level 1 students draw in the margins on every page of their notebooks since these notebooks I am forced to use don’t have any! They’re terrible and do nothing for teaching my students how to write properly, so I decided to have them all do the margins in advance. One student, with fifteen minutes left of class, declared to me that she didn’t want to and will continue the work on Wednesday. I told her that if she doesn’t draw margins for the next fifteen minutes, she won’t be leaving the classroom until 4:15.

Another student suddenly and aggressively kicked the back of another student’s chair. He was immediately sent to the timeout chair and was not released until after I knew his violent and haughty spirit was broken. He was in timeout for about 30 minutes. He finally made the pathetic plea to be able to return to the classroom. I made him wait after his plea and then had a civil conversation with him about his behavior and how he SHALL NEVER KICK ANOTHER STUDENT AGAIN.

I had to lecture all my students about how they SHALL NOT TEAR PAGES OUT OF THEIR NOTEBOOKS. Should they do this, that page will be thrown into the recycle and they must re-write all the work again in their notebook. 

I did bring some innovative education into the classroom today. I told my students a bit about my travels over the break, teaching them about relevant things that they themselves might run into one day (many of my students travel with their families around Asia and Europe and North America), such as passports and visas and public transportion in other cities and currency exchange rates. This was fun, because I brought these in for them to look at: my passport, Indonesia visa, Hong Kong money and Indonesian money, bus tickets, my octopus card from Hong Kong. They rather enjoyed the hands-on experience.

Of course, it was an exchange, so I got to hear some of all my students’ vacations as well. One girl brought in dried mangos from Cebu for the whole class. She was very excited about the opportunity she had to speak English in the Philippines. I was proud of her. I told her that her English really had improved. It was true.

Gotta love the first day of a new semester. Nineteen more weeks until summer vacation…

The Miracle of Education

Something happens when you actually start teaching children. They learn something. It’s incredible. In fact, I think it’s a miracle!

I made mention in an earlier blog of how I was going to paid for watching movies some time soon. Well that time is upon me, and my two weeks of movie-watching with children have begun. And it is in this non-traditional English class setting where I encountered – quite keenly – the miracle of teaching.

The structure of the course’s curriculum is designed to be student led. If this fails, the purpose of the course fails, and we just have a classroom full of students blankly staring at a screen filling out worksheets. Watching movies with ESL children effectively is actually a challenge. And one I was going to need to tackle if this was truly going to be student-led class.

(Side note: the point of student-led classes is that the teacher doesn’t need to do anything. [puzzled face of indifferent frustration])

So on the first day of class, I taught my students how to teach themselves, that they were going to be watching a movie with their brains this week, and it actually might be a little hard because it’s all in their second language. I taught them that they were going to have jobs, and needed to take notes, and might start seeing things they did not see before. I told them that people write books about movies – no, not write books like J.K. Rowling (We’re watching The Sorcerer’s Stone) but write a BOOK about the MOVIE. I told them they were going to be movie critics in this class, and BigByte has never offered a course like it!

And then there were technical difficulties. (Of course, it was the first day of class.) But we were still able to watch a segment of the film, because I felt not watching any of it would have been stupid and Teacher Victoria would not be daunted. And then students uncomfortably stepped into their roles of word master, discussion leader, summarizer, and character observer. I coached them through the entire process. I was beginning to wonder how this “student-led” course was actually going to go.

But I kept encouraging them and cheering them on and applauding the students who took on roles the first day of class. And I prayed to God above that these students would learn to engage or else it was going to be a tough week. 

Today, before I even started my introductory comments for the second day of class, students were already volunteering to take on roles. I was so impressed. I sensed motivation and engagement in the atmosphere, and I was so encouraged. IT WAS A MIRACLE!

Perhaps this is what teaching is all about.

Help and its many forms

There are some moments I’ve experienced in the classroom that I will never forget. It’s in these moments that I learn grace. I learn how to be more human. I learn, quite literally, to behave more as an adult.

It’s a fact: there are times when you’re students are just straight-up annoying. The most helpful thing any one of them could do for you as a teacher is go and un-enroll in English school – quickly, too, before they change their minds. I was feeling these emotions very keenly one day while searching for something I had naturally misplaced. (My classroom towards the end of semester is a joke – one, big, messy joke.) One of my students (bless her precious heart) offered to help. I rather rudely blew her off, to which she responded by returning to her chair and wearing a I’ve-just-been-put-off expression on her face.

I quickly came around. “Dora, what’s wrong?”

“Why you don’t let me help you?” I had never heard such a sincere sentiment of inquiry coming from a student before.

“Ok, you can help me.”

And you know what? She found what I was looking for, that misplaced object that I couldn’t even tell you the name of anymore – she found it. And she found it because she wanted to help me. 

When class is over, my dismissal method on a good and energetic teaching day is to have the class line up at the door. They are allowed to leave after they’ve answered a questions correctly or spelled a word for me or beat me at Rock, Paper, Scissors. (Fun cultural and linguistic note: That game here, due to a literal translation from the Chinese language, is called Paper, Scissors, Stone.) Sometimes, when I’m feeling extremely generous or inspirational, I might hand out a little treat or tell each student an individual comment about their class performance that day.

On that day Dora helped me (and graciously so, considering I initially refused her offer), I dismissed her last just so I could tell her sorry for refusing her help.

Help comes in many forms; and when you’re a teacher, it may come in the form of a seven-year-old. A seven-year-old with more grace and patience than I like to give children credit for.

The big NO-NOs

Teacher’s can’t get away with murder – murder in the classroom, anyway. I guess there is that slower, more tortuous form of murder a teacher could be responsible for, a more subliminal kind that comes in the form of evil education…

I will admit a teacher is rather formational. Look at all of us today! Just IMAGINE teaching a beginning level class. (At my school, we label this level Foundation.) Every student in that classrooms represent a mind that is quite possibly void of all English language. You are looking at a whole bunch of clean slates. A set of canvasses. A brand new notebook – the kind with no lines! YOU COULD TEACH THEM ANYTHING. The teacher who gets them in the next level will just have to un-teach your pig latin lessons and postmodern color wheel…

But the fact remains that I cannot GET AWAY with murder in my classroom. Surveillance cameras are set up, the doors and walls are made of glass, and students don’t remain silent unless you…right. Again, can’t do that.

There are also the other no-nos that come with maturity. By maturity here, I mean as your teaching career ages. For example, arguing with your students about philosophy when you’re only their elementary school English teacher. And English is their second language.

I did this today. I actually do this often (not terribly often), and every time I know I’m wasting my breath and I should really just redirect, but I can’t help myself.

I’m trying to teach the vocabulary word pollen visually up on the board and was already experiencing crappy teaching syndrome due to my health being at an all time low of 2%. (If I even started to raise my voice a little bit I started to feel like my voice was boxed in around my head since my ears have been feeling clogged due to my head cold.) I asked my students if they had ever sneezed when smelling flowers. I received a blank and boring “no” from about two students. I prodded.

“Who here has smelled flowers? Don’t you go outside and pick flowers and smell them?”

“PICK!!!???” exclaimed a student in shock.

“Yeah, pick flowers.” Was I getting somewhere?

“Teacher, we can’t pick flowers.”

“WHAT!!!!????” Now it was my turn to respond in shock.

“Our teacher says we can’t pick flowers.”

“How do shops have flowers?”

“They’re fake.”

“You mean all those flowers in the shops are fake? Those flowers are not fake! Where do they get their flowers???!!!” I was trying not to shout.

At this point, the discussion had gotten so philosophical that my students were resorting to Chinese, but for our purposes here I’ll keep everything translated to English.

“They planted them.”

“SO THEY PICKED THEM!”

“We can’t pick flowers!”

“You just said they planted them. So how did they get them?”

Some of my students were already bored. I felt like some of the more intelligent ones were beginning to get uncomfortable.

“They planted them.”

“SO THEY PICKED THEM! You CAN pick flowers!”

“Teacher, flowers are life.”

“Then why do we eat meat?”

I can’t stop. It’s bad.

“Meat? Meat is not life.”

“WHAT IS MEAT?”

“Flowers you have to cut. And they are life.”

“Meat you have to -”

“Kill!” Thank you. There was a student who miraculously saw where I was going.

“You have to kill animals to eat meat!”

You can see why this is a no-no. And it’s pretty obvious that I lost all self-control. The philosophical conclusion we arrived at? Students, use your brain! This actually ended up working out a bit since I got to passionately explain the difference between fact and myth later. My examples for myth were controversial (of course) and got some of my students thinking…”But some people think that is real…” I jumped on that statement and then explained to my students what actually makes a fact. You need to CHECK it. You need PROOF. You need SCIENCE.

My moment of philosophical victory came when I gave those “We can’t pick flowers” students a smug look and delivered this statement with a punch: “You can’t believe all facts. You must ask questions and use your brain.”

I’m ridiculous. Sometimes I don’t think I’m fit for the elementary educational setting.

Then there’s the more obvious and clear-cut no-no, especially when you’re teaching at an English cram school. NO CHINESE IN THE CLASSROOM.

One of the Chinese teachers walked in on a mini writing lesson a student was giving me up on the white board today. He was teaching me the proper way to write 我. I already impressed him with my 你 that I wrote up on the board for him when he asked if I could write it. 

Theory & Reality

In theory, going to the bathroom should be a great escape from the noise and annoying energy of my students. In reality, they call my name outside of the bathroom door with assignments in hand waiting eagerly for my approval and release to their next step in life WHILE I’M ON THE POT. One time a student even asked me if I was OK. Sweet, kid. Real sweet.

In theory, having enough worksheets and bookwork prepared for your students to do should eat up any spare time they might find to be naughty. In reality, the smartest and slowest of students can dismantle a teacher’s best-laid plans, either through annihilating the work in record time or simply by asking question and after question after question after question after question…you get the idea.  (Note to self: not all worksheets are effective.)

In theory, there is no such as a stupid question. In reality, REALLY!!!????! DID YOU REALLY JUST ASK ME THAT?! TURN ON YOUR BRAIN!

In theory, spanking could be considered child abuse in some circles. In reality, anyone who supports that theory has never worked with children and has only watched really sad movies about kids in rough home situations. There is something to be said for educational systems that allowed teachers to physically punish students. Not sure what there is to be said, but there’s something.

In theory, lesson plans are useful tools to keep the teacher organized and the class on task. In reality, even the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

In theory, education changes lives. In reality, it’s either building up or tearing down my character one painfully naughty student at a time…

In theory, the English language is a beautiful thing. In reality, it is TOO well sought after and I would really like to just keep it to myself sometimes.