My Last Week in the Classroom

I had a pretty rough time of it in the classroom during my third week here, and I was feeling down which was probably quite apparent from my tone in an earlier blog. The thought of having to face another week of being ill-used by my students here overwhelmed me, and I found myself crying on my way to school on Monday morning. I had told Lili about the problems I had managing the students’ behavior, and she said I should ask some of the English teachers for help. So, I did, but it was hard. The English teachers at Branch 2 don’t speak English very fluently. They didn’t understand what I was asking for. Finally a student teacher who is doing her practicum at the school overheard us and interpreted for me. I got support from one of the English teachers who went with me to the lessons she normally would have covered. This was fantastic, because she teaches Class 12, my most difficult class. She kept the kids in order, and they actually learned the whole poem and sang Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes with me! It was a good lesson. For the rest of my lessons, I was left on my own, sometimes with the base teacher, and sometimes without, but things went pretty well.  I was relieved on Tuesday night to be finished with teaching first grade. I just don’t know how those primary school teachers can do it!

Wednesday was a different matter. I had worked really hard on a lesson that I thought would be fun and challenging for the sixth graders, and I was excited. I had gathered all sorts of everyday reading material from home, things like a menu from a restaurant, a receipt from a grocery store, a candy bar wrapper, the liner notes from a CD, etc. I had bundled these materials into cute little packets. I couldn’t make enough packets for every child in class, but I made enough for groups of four to work with. Then I made a very short questionnaire about the items in the pack. I wanted the groups of students to have fun sorting through the materials and reading what they could, and to use context clues to “read” for other information.  This is an important reading skill, one I think English language learners should practice. For example, I asked how much the “Thai Salad” costs at a California Pizza Kitchen. The students may not know what “California Pizza Kitchen” is, and they may not know the word “Thai,” but they do know pizza, kitchen, salad, and costs (I checked their workbooks), they can recognize numbers and the dollar sign, they know what a menu looks like, and they could match the words “Thai Salad” to what was printed on the menu. In their workbooks, they are used to seeing charts and answering questions about costs. It would take some time and effort, but I thought that four of them together could figure out what to do. I made the questionnaire look just like what they were used to answering in their English workbooks, and it was only five questions long. I also brought candy to give to the group that completed the questionnaire correctly first. Doable, right? Wrong. This was way too hard for them. Or at least it was too hard for students who were not listening to my instructions or watching me demonstrate what to do because they were talking or throwing things or doing math homework. I barely got them to open the packets that I had worked so hard to make, and I could barely get the packets all collected again by the end of class. I was very disappointed, but I was determined that it could work, if I just adjusted it a bit.

In the next class, I spent more time comparing what was in the packet to their Chinese equivalents. I held up the English menu next to a menu written in Chinese.  I showed the receipt from Publix and one from Tesco. I think they got the idea more, but they did not want to work together with the students sitting near them. One child would grab the packet and keep it from the others, while another child would get out of her seat to work with a different group. No one finished the questionnaire, and I was bummed.

I decided to scrap the packets for my third lesson. My back up plan was to use a huge stack of conversation cards I had made. Each card had a simple question written on it, something like, “What is your favorite color?” or “What did you eat for breakfast today?” The idea was to have each child take a card, read the question to the partner seated next to him, and try to answer it. Then he would listen to his partner’s question and answer. Then the card would be passed to the person sitting in the next row. He would take the card from the person in front of him, and he would do the process again with the next question. This sort of worked. The students were very reluctant to speak aloud, even to each other. They all read the cards to themselves, and then sat quietly. I tried to explain and gesture that they should read the question aloud and say the answer aloud. A couple of students stood to say their answers aloud to the whole class. “Red.” “Milk.” This made everyone else even more confused. So, I let them pass around the cards for a few more minutes and read them to themselves. I checked in with several students who could indeed answer their questions, and this was good, I guess. With the leftover time, we played “I Spy,” and some of the students were interested.

I decided to start my fourth lesson with “I Spy,” and then make a game out of the conversation cards, but I never got the chance. This class was particularly rowdy, and was not very much interested in guessing what I spied with my blue eyes. The kids were talking, roughhousing, getting out of their desks, and playing on their cell phones. I raised my voice to try to get their attention, but only two students were interested in the game.  This class had enjoyed playing “Hangman” last week, and so I decided to try that instead. Nope. Not interested this week. So, I just stood silently and sternly and waited for them to calm down. They did after about a minute, but the moment I started talking again, so did they. A few loud minutes passed as I struggled with them to practice their spelling. As I turned to the board to write a letter down for our game, someone in the room threw a piece of chalk at me. It hit me on the back of my right thigh and won a lot of giggles. That was my limit. Cultural difference or no, I do not work with students that throw things at me. Period. I erased the board, grabbed my coat, told the students that I would not work with them any more, and left. They were stunned. Three of the naughtiest boys ran into the hallway pleading with me to come back. They tried to cut in front of me as I went down the stairs, and pulled on my coat sleeves, and whined that their teacher would “be very angry with [them]!” “Yes,” I said, “he probably will be angry with you.” I marched into the English department office with the three boys in tow, and explained what had happened. The teacher who normally has this lesson with that class said she would go back with me, and I tried to politely tell her that I would not go back. The students had gone too far to give a second chance. She took over for the remaining fifteen minutes and sent a small group of students to apologize to me. What a rotten day.

I regrouped that afternoon and decided to do something totally different with my remaining eight lessons. A friend of mine is the English as a Second Language teacher at her school, and I recalled a cool lesson she had done with her students. I went to Tesco and bought lots and lots of candy. 400 pieces to be exact. The ladies working in the candy aisle thought I was crazy picking through all the bins of candy and filling up eight bags. They actually called a store manager over to speak to me in English. Pointing to all the bags of candy in my shopping cart she said, “I do not understand.” I just smiled and said, “I am a teacher.” Then I pointed to the candy and said, “For my students.” She nodded and smiled.

On Thursday word had gotten around that I had walked out of Class 7. The students (and their teachers) were a little wary of me and a little bit curious. Eva called each of the base teachers and asked that they stay with me to help manage the behavior.  Before each lesson started, the base teachers yelled at the students and wagged their fingers, and then I began. “I think you will like our lesson today,” I teased as I pulled a bag of candy from behind me. The students looked very excited. “But,” I continued, “for this lesson, you need paper and a pencil.” I modeled tearing out a sheet of paper and held up a pencil. They immediately got to it. Then, without speaking, I showed them how to trace an outline of their hands on the paper. On the board I drew a big hand and labeled each finger with one of the five senses. “The five senses!” one boy said. There is a unit on the five senses in the fourth grade English workbook. We reviewed what each sense was, and the kids labeled the “fingers” on their papers, one sense per finger. I took a piece of candy and inspected it so that everyone could see. “Hmm. This candy looks pretty good,” I said. “It has a red wrapper. It has gold writing. It is shiny.” On the board under “sight” I wrote red, gold, shiny. Then I rolled the candy between my fingers and listened to it. It was so quiet, even the students at the back could hear the crinkling wrapper. “This candy sounds pretty good too,” I continued. “It crackles and crunches. It is quiet.” Under “sound” I wrote, crackles, crunches, quiet. I continued inspecting my candy, and by the time I got to “taste,” the kids were in a frenzy. They could hardly stand it any more. Then I said, “Now you write about your candy.” I walked up and down the aisles and let each kid pick a piece of candy. Because I had been so thorough in my shopping, there were lots of types of candy to choose from. Some were soft, some were hard, some were smooth, some were crisp, some were pink, and some were green. There were jellies and hard candies and crumbly candies and milky candies. Most of the students understood to describe their own candy, and a couple just copied what I had written on the board, but everyone was on task comparing their candy to their friends’ candy and brainstorming words to describe how good it was.  I had a few minutes and a few pieces of candy remaining. I invited the students to say sentences out loud about their candy in exchange for another piece.  A few students were willing, and one little boy even said, “My delicious candy is brown and smooth. It has a strong smell and tastes like coffee.” Wow!

During my following lessons, I was more careful to help brainstorm a variety of descriptive words on the board before I described my own piece of candy, but basically, I kept things the same. I was glad not to have to reinvent my lesson yet again. Although this lesson did not make more than just a few students practice their spoken English, I do feel that it was worthwhile. And I was glad to end my time at the Shenyang Experimental School on a positive note. That’s the power of candy, baby.