This was Maureen’s first class, the first day of a new term in September, 2006. Luckily, I didn’t have a course to teach at that time, so I was able to take a few photos of this special event. Maureen began most of her courses the first week, while I only began one of my courses, a Society and Culture course with three sections. As a result, I had time on my hand the first week. In preparation for the courses we were to teach, lessons had been prepared. Maureen began with conversation classes.
The initial classes showed us something about teaching Chinese students that we hadn’t really expected or understood – the quietness of the students. We had expected our students to be polite based on what we had heard and on stereotypes that had been in place. We didn’t expect that the politeness would be so quiet, after all, our students were young and energetic.
Thankfully, our first lessons required students to do some basic presentations so that we would have a reasonable understanding of their level of English ability. Of course, having teaching experience also helped. It became evident to the students that we were real teachers, not just English-speaking foreigners who got hired to provide and authentic English voice. Both Maureen and I used pair work (两人一组 – liǎng rén yī zǔ) having the students introduce each other to the new teacher (老师 –
| lǎo shī). We had to call on the students by their student number as we didn’t know their names to come to the front of the classroom for the presentations (上来表演 – shàngshǎng lái biǎo yǎn). Once that exercise was done, we had English names to match Chinese faces as well as a baseline measure of each student’s English ability. |
My course, being a content course, required the students to do homework (作业 – zuò yè), basic text reading and questions for comprehension, so that class time would be used for “talking” about the content. When I presented the first homework assignment, I got the usual groans that I was used to hearing from my students in Canada. Hearing their groans and complaints, I smiled because the students had just communicated that they were, indeed, just like students in other parts of the world.