Day 1: Teaching in China

My Class, 5 cute dark pairs of eyes looking at me with curiosity and silent. I was standing there in front of them, my assistant, Julie who I later found out to be a newbie too was asking me to teach, but how, I had no idea…

I gave myself a few seconds to think through the nerves and then had a look at the workbook. I asked, “What have you been learning?” my students looked at me confused. Julie, who spoke good english was also lost at this stage… I had not been told anything, I had a book, but didn’t know what level they were nor what page they were even on.

After some fun and games trying to ask where they are Julie helped me out and spoke to the students in Chinese. The class started rolling slowly onward as I tried several attempts at getting them to repeat some phrases I thought would be apropriate to the topic they were on, countries. My voice at this point had stopped trembling and I was beginning to get quite frustrated with the language barrier which made my job next to impossible. I figured the first impression thing had already worn off and the students were back into the, he speaks blah blah blah and I don’t understand anything attitude, thus I wasn’t really getting anywhere at all with them.

My assistant, sweet and genuine but fairly clueless, gave me a few ideas, but she wasn’t too much of a help, having literally started the same morning I had. As the class finished I really hadn’t enjoyed myself and was more frustrated, but i’m always up for a challenge so I read as much as I could about teaching and games I could play for my next class starting on Monday morning; 30 children grade 1, 4x 45 minute classes, was my morning. Yes, I had just been thrown into the deep end without any training,qualifications, experience or even a TEFL certificate.

This entry was posted on 22/02/2010 at 09:13 pm and is filed under Teaching in China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.