I haven’t written much about my job here, which is teaching English to the children of Yuxi. I had a perilous start due to changes in Chinese work visa rules, but now that those issues are resolved, I’ve had the chance to reflect on my work.
I work for Shane English Yuxi, which is an affiliate of a chain of British language schools that operate under the umbrella of The Saxoncourt Group. In addition to running English schools in China, Saxoncourt has operations in Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Algeria, and Poland. It has developed an integrated curriculum and a system for teaching it.
Shane English Yuxi is a private English school and is not part of the Chinese public school system. The 550 kids who take English from us do so either in the evenings or on the weekends, when they are not attending their regular Chinese schools. There are other language schools in Yuxi, but Shane is the only one to employ native speakers. That costs more and is reflected in the tuition charges. Nevertheless, due to the one-child policy, nearly every kid here has two parents and four grandparents devoted to his or her welfare and willing to pay for it.
I’m currently teaching nine classes, each of which meets once a week for 90 minutes, plus a ten minute break. I expect to be assigned one or two more; eleven courses is considered a full load. I teach one course each on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings and three courses each on Saturdays and Sundays. I also spend about ten hours a week preparing my classes and attending teachers meetings.
In each class, I have a bilingual Chinese teaching assistant who provides translation when needed. Though we strive to be an English-only environment, there are situations where it is necessary to communicate with children and their parents in Mandarin. The TAs also run the review classes, which also are scheduled once a week for 90 minutes. They help keep order in the classroom, grade the daily spelling tests and workbook entries, and assist with logistics. Many of them know the Shane system very well, and I rely on them for help in understanding what my students already know and what they don’t. They are terrific teachers in their own right and make me look much better than I really am.
My classes fall into three age groups: kindergarteners, six to nine year olds, and nine to twelve year olds.
The kindergarteners are sweet, if a little short in the attention span department. We play lots of physical games: hotseat, run-and-tap, throw-the-sticky-ball-at-the-board, etc. We use music that involves movements (run, walk, swim, dance, hop, skip, jump, touch, etc.). The students use a book that consists primarily of pictures to be colored. These classes can have unpredictable emotional and interpersonal problems: a sobbing girl who refused to leave her mother’s side to enter the classroom, a whole class that one day just went unaccountably bananas, a boy who became angry and sullen when another kid banged into him hard. The TAs work hard to keep the kids focused.
The kids between six and nine have a lot of material to master while at the same time being at an age when they are experimenting with being deliberately naughty. One of my classes at this level has a number of students drawn from my summer phonics minicourse. They know me and I know them and the class runs fairly smoothly. Other classes at this level, though, are more of a handful: they have boundless energy and a determination to test the limits of authority.
The students nine and above are more sedate, less interested in physical games and more into jokes and verbal challenges. I enjoy these students a lot. By this age, they know enough English to have real conversations. They’re also committed to learning, or they would have dropped out. At this level, they begin keeping diaries according to a prompt I give them each class. A few weeks ago, we did a unit on rules which contrasted “not allowed to” with “must.” I asked the students to write about the rules in their Chinese schools. Here is one of the results, written by Michael, a twelve year old:
I’ve learned that teaching young kids is a lot harder than teaching older kids and adults. As such, I have a newfound respect for elementary school teachers. They have a great deal of foundational material to teach and so many behavior issues to contend with. There’s a lot of psychologizing involved. Even for someone who has raised kids himself, children at that age can seem like an alien species. It’s a species I am getting reacquainted with and one that I am determined to do well by.
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