First Grade

Teaching first grade is really hard.  It’s so hard that I want to say that again: teaching first grade is really hard.  Being a fairly laid back person, I am rarely offended.  However, the one thing that really upsets me is when people who don’t know anything about education make thoughtless remarks about how easy work must be for teachers, particularly primary grade teachers.  This happens all the time. For example, at a party not too long ago, I was introduced to someone new.  When she asked what I did for a living and I told her I was a teacher, she actually patted me on the head and told me how “adorable” that was. Having dinner with some friends not long afterwards, someone mentioned that his neighbor seemed always to be home early.  He had wondered how she afforded to live in the apartment across from his if she didn’t work, and finally he asked.  It turns out that she was a kindergarten teacher, and so “she didn’t have a real job after all,” he said.  The whole table erupted with laughter. I had trouble staying for the rest of the meal.  He obviously didn’t see his neighbor lugging in crates full of student work and lesson planning materials.  He didn’t see her going to every student’s house for a required “home visit” before each term.  He didn’t see her preparing several mini-lessons and structured activities for each school day.  She may have gotten home earlier in the afternoon than he did, but her job was far from over.  Let me make this perfectly clear, in case you, dear reader, are someone who would have laughed at that kindergarten teacher, too.  Just because what primary grade teachers do is cute does not mean that it isn’t serious. What could possibly be more important that teaching children to be literate, to be compassionate, and to communicate? Nothing.  Primary grade teachers are not only responsible for teaching content knowledge, but they also teach thinking skills and work on the moral formation of their students in such a way and at such a critical time in the development of the child, that it is unlike any other stage of education.  They have to do all of this and patiently help zip up jackets and pull on mittens, and wipe runny noses, and tie shoelaces, and walk children to and from recess, and sit with them in the cafeteria, and comfort cry babies, and constantly sanitize the surfaces in their classrooms, which are essentially big, germy petri dishes.

Teaching small children is such a big responsibility that I am not interested. No, thank you. No way.

This is why I was dismayed when Lili told me that I was not to teach fifth and sixth grade at Shenyang Experimental School as I had planned, but first and sixth.  She said that it would be “so fun” and that I should teach a nursery rhyme to the students.  I don’t even know what that means. Teach a nursery rhyme to them? Without out any Chinese language skills?

I asked my colleagues back home and my family and friends if they had any suggestions.  I am grateful for all of the wonderful support I received.  My dear sister-in-law, who is an elementary school teacher and mother of two young children, and my mother-in-law’s friend, who is an elementary school principal, both gave me the same solid, practical advice: get the kids involved in the lesson with movement, music, pictures, or tactile objects.  If I can’t explain what the words are, I should show them.  My real savior was my mom, who, as I mentioned before, is a retired first grade teacher.  She helped me choose a poem to teach and gave me some good ideas for how to actually organize the activities in the lesson.

The first graders have had about four months of English lessons.  They have all chosen or been given an “English name” for school, can say the alphabet, can count to twenty, and can ask, “What is your name?” and “How old are you?”  So, I decided to start there.  I didn’t bother trying to explain why I was in their classroom or where I was from.  When the bell rang, I said. “Hello! My name is Perrin. What is your name?”  The braver students raised their hands to say, “My name is Judy!” “My name is Rita!” “My name is Sam!”  Many of them have sweet, somewhat old-fashioned names.  There are lots of Sallys, Timmys, and Bobbys at Shenyang Experimental School.  After we had spent some time on this, I pointed to “Rain” by Robert Louis Stevenson, which I had printed on the chalkboard.  I read through the entire thing, acting out the words as I went.  Then I said, “You will read this too!”

I passed out a sheet of typing paper to everyone and motioned that I wanted them to fold it half, and in half again.  They could follow along just fine as I modeled it for them.  When we opened the paper back up, we counted the squares on the page: “One… two… three… four squares!” Then I gestured to them to take out pencils.  This was harder than I thought it would be.  Many of them needed reassurance that what they had chosen was OK.  I got lots of little tugs on my coat and students asking, “Teacher! Teacher! Yes or no?” as they pointed to their writing implements.

Once everyone was set with a pencil, I underlined rain in the first line of the poem.  I mimed writing it on my own paper and spelled the letters aloud.  They wrote rain in the first square of their own papers.  Then I pointed out the window to the sky and said, “Rain is wet and falls down in little drops.”  I wiggled my fingers like rain was falling.  They didn’t understand what I had said, but they thought I was funny, wiggling my fingers around.  I had them copy me, and they thought that was funny, too.  Then on the board I drew a cloud with rain falling from it.  Some of the kids got it right away.  Others needed to look at the illustration I had made, which I carried around the classroom.  With enough pointing and nodding, I managed to have them draw a “definition” of rain in the box with the word.  I redirected their attention back to the board where we found raining and rains in the poem, and we practiced reading these.  Then we chunked the first part of the line and tried reading it through.  I said, “The rain,” and then gestured for them to repeat, which they did.  “Is raining,” I continued.  They mimicked me.  Then we tried the whole thing.  “The rain is raining…” “The rain is raining…” When they got the hang of it, I asked them to stand and add in our special rain finger wiggle.  They loved doing this so much that they forgot to read the words.  So we had to practice a little bit more.

We did this whole process with around, falls, and field.  Each time was a bit harder, as the six-year-old attention span is quite short.  But by the end of the lesson, we had filled four squares on our papers and could read and act out nearly all of the first two lines: “The rain is raining all around, / It falls on field…” I was so proud.

Wrapping up the lesson was very tricky.  These classes have between thirty-five and forty students in them, and I didn’t want to let go of their notes. Materials like typing paper are hard to come by.  It seems that most Chinese lessons are taught from disposable workbooks.  The teachers rarely need to make copies of things, and the students do not keep binders or have loose-leaf paper.  I had purchased the paper for them on my own. I wanted to collect their “notes” in seating chart order so that I could pass them back next week and have the students fill in the four squares on the back with the remaining key words from our poem.  But, I couldn’t explain this to them, of course.  I mimed for them to hold their papers up for me to collect as I walked by, and I tried to turn it into a counting game, with the class chanting with me.  In each class, the sweet kids, trying to be helpful, passed their papers to each other and towards the front before I could get very far.  If the class had been smaller, and I had had access to more paper, a paper cutter, and to tape, I could have helped the kids make a pocket on the inside of their English workbooks to keep their notes in, but I didn’t.  Keeping the notes myself was my best option, I thought.  So now, I have twelve little stacks of paper on my temporary desk in the first grade office.  I will try to pass the papers back to their rightful owners next week, but I’m sure that lots of them are mixed up, and this will cause BIG DRAMA.  I might need to invest in another ream of paper and just review the first four words on the board.  Oh, well.

After my last first grade lesson of week one, I felt tired and defeated.  One of the real first grade teachers asked if I thought the students could understand me.  “No,” I said, “they don’t.”  I hope they are getting some benefit from spending thirty-five minutes a week with me, but I’m not so sure their skills in English will be much advanced by this nursery rhyme.  I’m not so sure my skills as a middle school teacher will be advanced by this either.  One thing is for sure, though: I really appreciate my twelve-year-old students back home much, much more.