teaching-student

Career Couch

2009-06-02T13:40:00.004+08:00

The other day I sat down with a student to talk about her upcoming interview with a foreign company. She is two decades older than me and the potential salary at the job is five times what I make. I've had about three jobs in my life that didn't involve serving food. And somehow, here I am, telling people who are almost twice my age not to focus on their weak points during the interview and not to write about their hobbies on a resume. I realize that the people I am talking about, asking me for career advice when they have had jobs for longer than I have had adult teeth, often started out in the days when the government was assigning jobs. There are good reasons that they don't know how to write an English-language resume or interview with a foreign boss and I do. None of those reasons have anything to do with one person being smarter than the other. But it is a crazy world where someone who probably couldn't get a job as a waitress in New York anymore is handing out interview advice to upper management in China.

lesson plan: Droodles

2009-05-30T20:50:00.001+08:00

Culture: Droodles

Introduction (10 minutes):

1.draw a droodle (e.g., Bubblegum Champion) on the board. Elicit from students what it is.
2.Key vocabulary: caption, humor, riddle, doodle
3.Popular in the 1950s and 1960s

Small group work (15 minutes):

Give each group a droodle or two to write a caption for and present to the rest of the class.

Allow 5-10 minutes for presentations.

Small group work (remainder):

Have students draw their own droodles and draw them on the board for the rest of the class. Have the class suggest captions and give the intended captions after one or two guesses.

Materials:

Handout and www.droodles.com examples

lesson plan: Olympian Gods and Goddesses

2009-05-30T20:45:00.001+08:00

Culture: The twelve Olympian Gods and Goddesses

Introduction (10 minutes):

1.Where is Mount Olympus? Where is Greece? (elicit from students)
2.Ancient Greece as the cradle of Western civilization.
3.God and goddesses in religion and drama (myths)

Quiz (10 minutes) & go over answers (10 minutes)

Students probably won’t know very many answers, more a way to introduce the most important facts.

Reading myths (20 minutes)

Students read abridged versions of myths in small groups and decide how to re-tell the myth the class.

Presentations (remainder)

Myths (varied by level):

Pandora’s box

Odysseus and the Cyclops

Narcissus and Echo

Lesson plans!!!

2009-05-30T20:23:00.004+08:00

Blogger is blocked in China (again) and I haven't been posting lately. I'll be posting some lesson plans that I have made for the culture class I teach on Mondays. It is an open class so the lessons are geared towards a multi-level group. The class is called "culture," the school's choice not mine, I am not an anthro professor. They're supposed to be language class that just uses culture as a topic. A lot of English students in China don't give a damn about the culture of English-speaking countries, so I try not to shove it down their throats, just give them enough so that they understand the basic references.

Sober up

2009-05-02T16:31:00.005+08:00

From the New Yorker:

"Sobering fact of the day: Only eleven per cent of Americans think it is very important to learn Chinese, while eighty-two per cent of Chinese think it is very important to learn English. This, thanks to surveys conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, described today at the National Chinese Language Conference. (Comforting fact: Despite the survey results, the conference is packed, with nearly nine hundred educators intent on expanding Chinese-language education. Chicago Public Schools have the largest Chinese-teaching program in America, with twelve hundred students learning Chinese. )"

I know that as a globally-conscious American I am supposed to be beating myself up about how Americans don't adequately learn foreign languages. If I were to recommend anything to young students it would be to learn to speak a foreign language and to use that language so that they don't forget it. But I totally object to the comparison being made above. Learning English for Chinese people is not the same as learning Chinese for American people. It might shock some people out there, but Chinese people don't learn English just so they can communicate with Americans. My students learn English to communicate with Australians, French, Germans, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesioans, & etc. Learning English is to kill a couple hundred birds with one stone. In contrast, the number of countries speaking Putonghua (commonly called Mandarin Chinese in English) is one. Sure there are more than a billion people here, but a lot of them don't speak Putonghua either. The point is, don't flatter yourself America. Chinese people aren't learning English just to talk to you, they're learning English to talk to all the people out there who don't speak Chinese. There are a lot of them.

We are cursed in a way because we speak the lingua franca of a large part of the world (when are they going to change that to lingua ingla or something?). There is little incentive to learn another language. And I have found that that remains true even in a place like China where lots of people don't speak English very well and still don't paticularly encourage others to have a whack at their language. So Evan Osnos and the Chicago Public School System and everyone else who has Hanzi in their eyes, don't learn Chinese to keep up with that stereotype of the studious Asian, do it because it is hard and will challenge your brain, do it because ethnocentrism is so last century, do it because even though the odds that you might ever need to use it are pretty slim (I know from experience) you might get get lucky and actually need it. It is like learning CPR, but waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more difficult.

Mid-term

2009-04-29T12:19:00.001+08:00

Had my first mid-term this morning. It was ok... certainly they're more fun to give than to take. We'll see how it turns out.

Propaganda

2009-04-23T17:20:00.003+08:00

As I was double-checking the pinyin (Romanization of Chinsese characters) for the Chinese word for "easy" while studying for my midterm next week I came across a little piece of propaganda in my very own dictionary:

"Simplified characters are much easier than complicated forms."

Decades ago, in a (misguided) attempt to increase literacy, the Chinese government developed a new system of writing their character that made some of them a bit easier to write. This system is referred to as simplified Chinese (who knew?). The characters used in Taiwain, Hong Kong, and Macau are usually called "traditional," unless you're my dictionary or someone trying to justify why changing the words made it somehow easier for people to read.

Mid-terms

2009-04-21T17:17:00.003+08:00

I've hit a lull recently in both my teaching and my studies lately and as a result haven't had much to post on this blog. During the most exciting times I'm a bit unconvinced that anyone could possibly care what I have to say about my life. While I'm in the intellectual and professional horse lattitudes that means I am especially hesitant to write anything. Next week however, is mid-term week over at the university and the litmus test for just how committed I am to studying Chinese.

As I type, I'm looking at my dopey pencil case whose label has been admonishing me since I started my course: "If you exceed it, it's not your limit." I'm not making this up, I own and carry a pencil case and that is what it says on the tag.

True motivation

2009-04-05T14:53:00.003+08:00

There is nothing like a good bit of Chinglish to make an ex-pat laugh, but what about the misuse of the Chinese language in other countries? The first people to put up bilingual signs in popular Chinese tourist destinations sure made a hash of it, so what about those Western people who do domething a little more permanent with their superficial knowledge of a foriegn language?

They do even worse. The people who write "beware of safety" get to walk away from their work, but some moron is running around with the word "idiot" on his shoulder forever. The picture is on www.hanzismatter.com.

I know I claim that I'm interested in learning the language so that I can actually communicate with people, but really I'm just hoping for the day when I can tell someone his tattoo really means "Buck-toothed son of a prostitute" instead of "strong eternal warrior."

Oh the irony

2009-03-30T11:37:00.003+08:00

Yesterday, during my fifth class of the day (I'm a big baby and prefer to teach no more than 4 per day) I got a little lazy and decided to play the picnic game for twenty minutes. For those of you who haven't been in kindergarten or and EFL class in some time, the picnic game is a memory game where each person must remember all the items their classmates were going to bring on a picnic and then add another one at the end. As in: "I'm going on a picnic and I am bringing a blanket, a bottle of water, & etc." It is a lovely little time-waster and the students are delighted to watch one another's memories fail.

Then I had to do it Chinese this morning.

lesson plan: Olympian Gods and Goddesses

2009-03-15T20:45:00.000+08:00

The jig is up

2009-03-13T12:03:00.000+08:00

The other day a potential client came in to talk about a potential business writing class for the law firm that he manages in our building. It wouldn't be very unusual except that a. we've never had a writing class and b. the client was American. Our training center is set up in a way that Jeremy Bentham would approve of. All of the internal walls are glass and the glass walls themselves don't even reach the ceiling. If a person wanted to, she could see and listen to what is going on in any adjacent room. So from my vantage point from my desk across the hall from the classroom where they were meeting in, I was dismayed that the sales and management team of our school presented him with the most dimwitted teacher on our staff to teach the course the client had in mind. I was dismayed that is was him in there and pissed that it wasn't me. Claiming ignorance doesn't work in modern legal systems and it doesn't work for my boss either. He knows that I have an academic interest in the law as well as some experience in the field. I'm probably not flattering myself by saying what an idiot this other teacher is, he isn't a particularly unpleasant person, but it is a little embarrassing to call someone your colleague who looks up words as mainstream as "mainstream" in the dictionary, and then proceeds to write down the wrong definition. After my pride and indignation had gotten the better of me, I realized that that little episode might actually be a good thing. Not for the potential client, because he was wasting his time, not for the school because if the man noticed what a simpleton my colleague is then they sure weren't getting the business. It was good for the EFL world. That client as a native speaker, would have noticed that my colleague had trouble with subject-verb agreement in the third person singular which is sort of a problem for people whose very jobs (i.e. lawyers) depend on using precise grammar. Also, being a foreigner himself, he was not likely to be impressed by simply talking to a "foreign teacher." For a giddy moment sitting in from of my computer I thought that the jig would someday soon be up for the English industry in China.

Later that night my clever colleague David commented that it was rather unusual that a foreigner came looking for an English class for his company. I disagree, I just think that it is the first time that it has happened. Lots of foreign workers are leaving China as of late. Hardship allowances are drying up faster than you can say "recession." The people who are sticking around have to try a little harder to make sure that those businesses aren't just doing well because of the cheap labor. If we are all being scrutinized a little harder I think that the students will really benefit. Sure, it is depressing to think that the presence of foreign managers poking their heads in is what it will take for the training school and their teachers to amp up their game but it would be nice to not be so embarrassed on a regular basis by my colleagues. And if I dig down enough, I think that I will soon be given the kick in the pants I need to go back to school. I do think that I am a much better teacher than a lot of the other foreign teachers here. But rationale for that belief is that a. I'm not stupid, b. I actively try not to be a jerk most of the time and c. I've never wanted to nor god forbid tried to sleep with any of the students. Not exactly a high standard that I am reaching.

RH (racist hiring)

2009-03-01T22:11:00.002+08:00

I've probably spent days of my life looking at the want ads for foreign teachers in China. Lots of them list the acceptable passports for a foreign teacher. They are usually a permutation of this list: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and South Africa. Sometimes the list stops at Canada. It has never included the Philippines, site of my recent travels and home to more English speakers than Australia and New Zealand combined. Also missing from the list is Jamaica, or any other English speaking country in the Caribbean. Ghana, Nigeria and any other country on the African continent that is not South Africa are also absent. I could go on listing English-speaking countries whose citizens don't make the cut to be an English teacher in China, but for the sake of brevity, I'll just get to my conclusion. Either foreign teacher recruiters in China think that they are more likely to get people who speak an English their students understand from the first list or they're just trying to up their chances of hiring white people without asking for a picture (which I've always found creepy).

At my last job, when the school was looking at possible replacements for me, they were sent a file from my company of a candidate from Ethiopia. "We are afraid the students won't be able to understand his accent," my colleague told me. They had trouble understanding the South African teacher, he explained, would someone from the same continent be any different? It wasn't his African-ness that was my colleague's problem, actually. It was his drunkeness.

I'd found myself in this position before, my interlocutor and I both knew what he wanted me to say, but I didn't want to say it. I told my colleague I couldn't give an opinion about someone whom I had never met. Later, I emailed HR. In brief I said that the school was trying to get me to justify their racism/ xenophobia and I wanted no part of it. I was protecting myself from the discrimination lawsuit that would only be filed in my head. HR wasn't bothered. Perhaps I wasted precious space in their inbox that day and needed to be discouraged from asking for any more time during the rest of my contract. Don't be so hard on the Chinese, said my reply. Those poor bastards never get to go anywhere, and it's not our fault it costs one hundred bones for you PC-loving Americans to get a Mainland visa. They're all the same so they don't understand anyone who is different.

Right.

I have pretty much the same feeling when people talk about the sexism of past (and in some cases very recent past) sexism. This is the lame excuse: "It was okay back then." I'm pretty sure there were plenty of women who weren't "okay" with not being able to go to school or own property or all sorts of things, so train your mealy mouth to come up with some other excuse.

I don't really buy the excuse that we have to let the Chinese be racist. Sure, we're all a bit racist but admitting that we are doesn't meant that we don't have to try to be less so. I feel a little disingenuous bitching about the racism that I believe (with evidence!) pervades Chinese hiring practices. If anything, I'm totally benefitting from the system. Even being a female foreign teacher is a point in my column. Before they've even read my resume, HR knows I am far, far, far, far less likely to try to date the students than most of the male teachers are. It might just be my way of feeling superior to the Chinese that I don't really like knowing that it is a total boon to my employability that I am a white woman. Or maybe I just want to know for sure that I'm getting the job because I really am a better teacher than all those knuckleheads out there.

Friendly Fire

2009-02-25T19:08:00.005+08:00

One of the lessons I have to teach is about describing people's appearances. It is one of my personal crusades to prevent students from making unintentially cruel statements about English-speaking people's weights, because they have a habit of doing it a lot. In addition to thinking that "plump" is an acceptable euphemism for "fat," most Chinese just can't fathom why is it so bad to call people "fat." I think it might have something to do with the fac that only rich people can afford to be fat around these parts. So during this class, when the subject inevitably comes up, I give a five-minute sermon, Thumper-style, about not saying anything at all about chubby foreigners.

After I give this little mini lesson in tact, I watch as they work out in their heads how many times they might have been rude to a foreigner in this way. Sometimes they try to argue with me and insist it can't be that bad if their teachers taught them "plump." But only yesterday did a student offer up this little suggestion: "What if we make it sound cute like, 'you look like a pig!'?"

First Days of School

2009-02-25T14:41:00.004+08:00

At the placement test for my Chinese class at Suzhou University, the Chinese teacher explained in carefully enunciated Putonghua that they normally racially profile the students for their class placement. This means that the Americans and Europeans are usually in the slow class and the Koreans and Japanese in the faster paced class. My year and a half in China has earned me a spot in the fast class. I'm totally flattered that she thought I could keep up with people who are somewhat more used to the character-based writing system and in the case of the trailing spouses, have a bit more time on their hands than I do.

My prior knowledge of Chinese is eclectic at best. I know how to say things like "immortal," "syphilis," "grammar," "I need to take a piss," "marathon," and "Where is the library?." But the holes in my vocabulary are gaping. I know how to say red but not pink, apple but not banana, dormitory but not apartment. There are loads of characters I know the meaning of but not the pronunciation, and there are several sentences that I can say without being able to recognoze them if I saw them written down. I'm an idiot savant at learning language through osmosis. Necessity caused me to learn food words rather quickly but the vocabulary of household chores is taking longer to catch on.

Sometimes I'm a little embarrassed that I'm actually really just an idiot at Chinese for all the time I've spent here. Or am I? There is a popular misconception amongst the Chinese and people in our home countries that China is a wonderful environment for learning Chinese. What the Chinese at least, fail to notice is that they are making that assertion in English. I have had better luck finding my bra size on the Mainland than finding someone to speak to me in Chinese. It is fairly easy to become proficient in buying vegetables, taking a taxi, and ordering water—all occassions when the other person probably doesn't speak English. Although in places like Shanghai, you might be surprised. I think I'm really just a normal person who has been able to cost by on her native language and the forces of politcal economy.

I had my third class this morning, and so far, things are ok. I'm keeping up. Maybe by the end I won't feel like such a failure at studying Chinese. I might work my way up to mediocre.

Englishes

2009-02-10T12:44:00.001+08:00

I think that linguists have already broken the bad news that there is no Standard English. The French have their Academie Francaise, but there is no English Academy. If there is an "English Academy" out there somewhere, it is probably a run-down training school in a lonely province. So the noble members of the EFL books and materials world have had to comfort themselves with making lots of vocabulary matching exercises to coordinate across the line drawn somewhere between British and American English. I hate teaching those lessons. Sometimes I hate the exercises because they are wrong. We have one book to illustrate vocabulary words that gets the American translation wrong about 76% of the time. In America, in case you needed a British man who found out everything he knows about American English from a copy of McGuffey's Reader, we call a chemist a druggist. We don't day "druggist" anymore because Drugs Are Bad. We have pharmacists who work and the pharmacy and sell pharmaceuticals. People who have studied a foreign language before now that it is just devastating when a word has more than one meaning, for that reason my students say "pharmacy" even if try to pronounce it "phahmacy."

Speaking of the world drug and its negative connotation, that concept never gets enough attention. It would be nice if we lived in a linguistic world of one to one correspondences. British people watch films and Americans watch movies. Except when Americans watch films, otherwise known as good movies. We use the word autumn as well, when we want to be poetic or sell a paint color. Connotation. The world of interior design also gets slighted by similarly broad strokes. We hang curtains in America and put up drapes in Britain. (Or do we put up curtains and hang drapes? I just don't know anymore). However the phrase goes, I'm pretty sure that we actually use both terms in America. There might be some sort of difference in their form and function also, but my mother is the guardian of that little piece of knowledge.

Accent and pronunciation form a whole different headache. Most Chinese students learn a non-rhotic pronunciation of British English. (I'm not dating one of them, but there are apparently British people who can pronounce the letter "r"). I don't know who decided this, but in my head, a long time ago someone resolved that if some Chinese people can't say the English letter "r" then they might as well just not bother and try to say "watah" like good British public school boys. I love attitudes like that; if something is hard, find a way to not try. Sometimes people tell me they want to learn an American accent, which I find sort of pathetically endearing. And sometimes people tell me they want a British accent, which I find obnoxious (because I am only human). If 99% of all the students I have ever had can barely use more than one verb tense, why are we talking about trying to affect an accent? We should be spending our time figuring out the present perfect, rather than trying to impress Henry Higgins. It is really disheartening to hear some smug bastard say he wants to learn a British accent when he is still pronouncing the word clothes as if it has two syllables. I really just want to pin those people to the ground until they can say "parallel."

Why do I hate worksheets where students have to match trousers the word motorway to highway? I think it discourages people from learning real skills about language. I know that I am not the only person who thought when she was young that each word I had in English had an exact correspondent in French or Spanish or Japanese. Learning a second language was just a matter of memorizing all those exactly equivalent words. Grammar was nonexistent and pronunciation could not be that much of a problem, could it? Like many people, I was dismayed to realize that this was not the case. Language learning, I found out sometime in 7th grade French class, is a lot more difficult, complex, and fun than that. We could spend a few seconds helping a student to draw a line between trousers in column A to pants in column B, or a few more minutes throwing in the word "slacks." Grandmothers from sea to shining sea would be grateful. Or we could teach students how to learn a word from context, how to expand their vocabularies by reading, how to ask people to repeat themselves without feeling embarrassed, and how to use a *&%$#@! dictionnary. There are loads of better uses of our time than vocabulary tables. If we really thought about it, my boyfriend and I could go on for days discussing how we speak the same language differently. But the important thing is that we understand each other (when we want to) and our students should be able to do the same.

Just as there is no Standard English, there is no standard American or even British English. Sure there have been plenty of xenophobes who've tried to enforce something like that in the past, but in the twenty-first century, I think we are moving on. I could pretend there was a monolithic block out there called Standard American English and that I was qualified to teach it. I would talk about highways and vaguely mention something called a parkway. But what about the zillions of people on the freeway in California at this very moment? Do I really want one of my former students going to the west coast someday and saying "But my teacher tell me that in American English you say 'highway'. " I believe that verb tenses and fluency are more important than breeding a generation of lexical pedants. Furthermore, I would rather do just about anything than teach the word "slacks." Who's with me?

Off the cuff

2009-02-09T22:39:00.002+08:00

China is the place to pump up your ego. Unless you're overweight (it either isn't very rude to tell people that they are fat in Chinese culture, or they're just messing with us), the Chinese treat the foreigners like we're rock stars, but better looking. Not only am I beautiful, brilliant and kind in China, but my ability to string a few Chinese words together gets me a category Very Good on the Chinese language scale for a foreigner.

This is not what I need. As a student, I'm a bit of a masochist. I need a ball-gag in my mouth before I actually get down to studying. No worthy piece of work did I produce while getting positive reinforcement. I've got ten days to cram before my placement test for the university course I'm taking this spring. Here's to hoping my teacher shows up with a riding crop.

Under construction

2009-02-06T11:33:00.001+08:00

I'll be putting up my first post sometime this weekend.

lesson plan: political cartoons

2008-10-30T20:41:00.000+08:00

Culture: Political cartoons

Introduce political cartoons (10 minutes):

1.What are politics? (elicit)
2.What are cartoons? (elicit)
3.Caricature, show examples. Key words: exaggeration, portrait, physical features. (try to elicit)
4.Symbols: Uncle Sam, donkey, elephant, whatever is relevant

Gallery (10 minutes):

Have students walk around the room and look at some cartoons posted on the walls (about 4 or 5)

Group discussion (15 minutes):

Have students give their opinions about each of the cartoons and supply additional information if necessary.

Small group discussion (10 minutes):

Give each group their own cartoon to discuss and analyze.

Present cartoons and analysis to the rest of the group (remainder)

Cartoon source: www.slate.com (cartoon of the day)