I teach a full load of eleven classes at Shane English Yuxi: four on Saturday, four on Sunday, and one each on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. It’s a pleasant and forgiving schedule, one that allows plenty of time to prepare for lessons and to experience life in this corner of Yunnan. Sundays are my favorite teaching day, since I have the greatest variety of age groups. This is how my work day went yesterday.
I got up at six and drank my usual two cups of coffee. The morning was chilly–in the mid-forties Fahrenheit–so I decided to walk to work rather than ride my bike. The morning sky was striped with beautiful pink-orange high-hanging clouds. The air may be horribly dirty in other Chinese cities, but here it’s clear and relatively unpolluted. I arrived at Shane a little before 8:00. As usual for a weekend, I was the first teacher in the building. My five colleagues drifted in by 8:10 and we began our day.
My 8:30 class was a group of eleven year olds. I know these students well, having just completed an earlier course with them. Today they were beginning the next-level course with a new text. As usual, they seemed very tired when I walked into the classroom; Chinese students work hard, even on the weekends. I started off class with a rousing game of hotseat to get them moving, posing first-person questions to the odd man out and third-person questions to the rest of the class. This group now knows enough English to write short personal essays, so to kick off the new material with something fun, I assigned a paper about what they and their friends like to do (which is the target language for the week) and imposed the additional requirement that their essays must include zombies. The students stared at me dumbfounded; apparently zombies are seldom included in their Chinese public school’s writing assignments.
My next class is a personal favorite: my twelve year olds. They’re my most advanced students and are a very verbal and good-humored bunch. To gain entry to my classroom, students have to answer a question in English. Today the entrance question was, “What did you do yesterday?” The replies went something like this:
Michael: I saw Nancy kissing Jack.
Nancy: I killed Michael.
Jack: I saw Nancy kill Michael.
After I called the roll, the students read their weekly essays aloud. My oldest student, Kevin, delivered a wonderful piece about how his mother always says that friends are like mirrors, but he disagrees: he thinks friends are like lamps. Pretty thoughtful stuff from a twelve year old writing in his second language! We then went on to new material and the introduction of adverbs: loudly, softly, well, badly, quickly, slowly, and so on. The class quickly grasped the concept.
Most of the teachers went to McDonald’s with me for lunch. We saw a number of students we had just taught, lunching with their parents. The young woman who served us was wearing a Santa dress. As we were finishing our meal, she brought us all complementary miniature ice cream cones.
Back at Shane, I kicked off my afternoon at 2:00 with a brand-new class of eight year olds. I spent the first half hour meeting with their parents, explaining the school’s procedures and expectations. One of our wonderful Chinese teaching assistants translated. After that, I had only an hour left to teach a lesson. The kids all seemed eager and cheerful. I think I’m going to have fun with them.
My last Sunday class started at 4:00. By then, I was feeling a little tired, but I always go into that class determined to use up every bit of energy I can muster. These students are the sweetest bunch of six year olds I’ve ever taught, and today’s class was particularly exciting. In previous weeks, we’ve gone through the phonetic sounds of the entire alphabet. Today it was time to put those lessons to good use and take a major step. I wrote A E I O U in a column down the center of the white board. On either side, I wrote columns of consonants. Then one by one I called each student up to the board and gave him or her a marker. “Ba,” I said, and Charlie, the first student, looked at the board, thought for a moment, and drew a line from the B in the left-hand column to the A in the middle. “Ag,” I said, and Charlie connected the A to the G in the right-hand column. I pointed to the letters and the lines he had drawn and held my breath. Charlie looked at the board and cocked his head. “Bag,” he said, with a little satisfied smile. And as far as I know, Charlie had just sounded out his first English word. The other students took their turns enthusiastically. I left the classroom at 5:40 feeling that a major milestone had been reached in my students’ lives . . . and mine. They are now really reading.
I was back home by 6:10, tired but satisfied and looking forward to Monday and Tuesday, which are my days off. Although I like my job a lot, having almost three days of me-time ahead is a wonderful thing to contemplate.
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