What's the Point?

On Monday and Tuesday I was back at Branch Two to teach the first graders again. I was better on Tuesday at handling them than I was on Monday, but it has been exhausting.  After dinner last night, I was so tired and upset that I shut myself in my room and didn’t come back out except to brush my teeth.  I haven’t felt this defeated by my students since I was a first year teacher at a tough, poor, public middle school.

I am very lucky to have well-behaved students at my school in Atlanta.  All kids can be talkative and playful at times, but the students at my school, for the most part, take their educations seriously and want to earn good grades, impress their teachers, and make their parents proud.  I can manage the behavior in class with my sense of humor and energy level.  I work hard to be peppy and positive and diffuse tense situations with laughter.  I invest hours every term planning assigned seats for my students to maximize my proximity to struggling or difficult students and to protect others from interacting inappropriately with others.  I train my students to follow certain procedures that make getting class started, collecting paperwork, and cleaning up after activities go smoothly and efficiently.  I hardly ever have to raise my voice to my students, and I think that we all have a pretty good time.  Occasionally, a student will step out of line too far.  This is when I rely on the Dean of Students, who will support me by giving the student a consequence for his actions, and can organize an effort to intervene with the student or his family if the misbehavior in class indicates a bigger issue.

Unfortunately, I can’t rely on any of this to manage the behavior of my students in Shenyang.  First, I don’t know anyone’s name, and I don’t have a seating chart.  The kids know that I will have a hard time pinning a consequence on their behavior because it is hard to keep track of them.  They also know that the activity I am asking them to do will not be counted for a grade.  Next, the classrooms are very crowded.  I can’t walk all the way around the room, and so if I run to one corner to keep a group of students on task, another group falls off task on the other side.  By the time I reach them, the first group is off task again.  Also, the students’ desks are very close together.  They can easily reach into each other’s desks and mess around with each other’s stuff.  This is problematic, especially in first grade, where I have had to sort out several cases of stolen papers and crayons, most of which have involved tears and lots of finger pointing. 

Finally, and this is the worst part, I don’t have the language skills to be funny in class, or at least not funny with a purpose.  For example, on Monday afternoon, Class Seven decided to play a little prank on me.  All of a sudden, just as we were about to practice “umbrellas” from line three of our poem, the room was filled with little sparkling lights, as if a disco ball had just been lowered into the classroom.  About half of the thirty-four students had taken little compacts with mirrors out of their desks and were trying to reflect sunbeams at my face.  They didn’t try to hide what they were doing at all. Some stood up on their chairs to catch a better angle, and everyone was giggling.  Believe it or not, this would be a pretty easy thing for me to solve at my school at home.  I would pick out the ringleader who organized the prank and saunter up to his desk.  Then I would pretend that I was checking my makeup in the little mirror and pretend to squeeze a pimple.  When I had finished primping, I would say, “Thank you, So-and-so, I look much better!  You can put away the mirror now… because I don’t want to look in it ever again.” Then I would smile very coyly at him until he put the mirror away.  Everyone would laugh and put their own mirrors away, and we would continue our lesson. This is what my instinct told me to do in Class Seven, too, and so I did.  Big mistake!  It really got everyone’s attention when I “squeezed” my pimple, but no one understood to put the mirror away.  Several students gestured for me to check my face in their mirrors too, and some of the kids who weren’t in on Round One of the prank, got involved in Round Two.

Class Twelve, at the very end of the day was even worse.  While we were acting out the words we had learned (something that the other classes found fun and engaging) eight boys got out of their desks and started rough housing with each other.  I don’t like yelling, and I hate having to touch a student, but I had no choice.  I thought someone was going to get hurt.  I screamed, actually screamed, “Go to your seats, now!” and I grabbed one boy by his arm and lead him back to his desk.  I was furious, but the class thought my anger was funny.  They imitated my screaming and giggled.  I vaulted up to the desk at the front and drew a diagram of the classroom in my notebook to show the base teacher where these boys sat and to take note of what they were wearing.  All of a sudden, I could tell they were worried. It got quiet.  I spent a good minute working on my notes, making a point of counting the rows of their desks.  I observed what the boys looked like, muttering to myself about the length of their hair, the color of their clothing, etc.  I closed the book. Then I calmly said, “I do not teach naughty students.” I sat down in the teacher’s chair and propped my head up on my hand, simply watching them.  Another minute passed quietly.  It felt like a long time.  When a couple of students began to stir, I opened my notebook again and made a big deal of marking where they sat and what they were wearing.  They stopped.  I could tell they were uncomfortable.  I made them sit quietly for another minute.  I noticed some of the wiser students quietly taking out their math homework to work on.  That was fine with me.  After another quiet minute, many more students had found something else to do on their own.  We passed the rest of the lesson this way.  There were about ten minutes left.  When the bell rang, I pointed at each of the especially rude boys.  Then I said, “I hope we have a better class next week.” And I left. I don’t think they understood the words I said, but I hope they understood the tone. And, I really do hope we have a better class next week.  I’m going to ask the base teacher to stay with us.

Things are only slightly better for me in the sixth grade classes.  Since these students have studied English longer, we can communicate more, but the same problems arise.  They know that they’re not going to be given a grade for their work, they know I don’t know their names, and there are so many of them that it is easy for them to fall into a mob mentality and just ignore me completely.  The sixth graders also seem less worried about what their base teachers will do to them if they are naughty.  This week our lesson is to play the “alphabet game” and “hangman,” and sing the “Hokey-pokey.”  The alphabet is way too hard for them; just saying the letters in order, even if they are written on the board, is very, very difficult for them.  They like hangman, for a while, if they can look in their textbooks to guess the words, and they think the Hokey-pokey is just stupid.  This lesson is another big flop.  Lili keeps urging me to just play games and to sing songs with them and to make it easy. But isn’t that what I’m doing!? I think I have chosen easy games, and I try to adapt to make the lesson even simpler when I find that it is too difficult for the students.  We sing songs. We move around. We go outside. And I’m still drowning.

There are two other foreign teachers working at the school as well.  I have only met one of them, however.  He is a young man from Nigeria and has been assigned to work in the fifth grade.  He is having the same problems I am having and wants to quit.  I think that if the Shenyang Experimental School hopes to keep recruiting teachers from abroad to guest teach, it needs to figure out a way to make the students accountable for what is taught during these special lessons, and the Dean needs to make the base teacher or the English teacher that would normally be teaching the lesson stay in the classroom with the foreign teacher. This is not happening for me.  I think the poor teachers here are so overwhelmed by the number of students and the amount of grading they have to do, they jump at the chance to have some extra planning time to work on their own.  Most of the base teachers have left the classroom before I even arrive.

I’m glad to have the opportunity to experience Chinese culture in a meaningful way, and not just as a tourist, but I am not having a good experience in the school here. I’m sorry to report that I feel my coming here is a big waste of time, money, and energy for me, for the Chinese students here, and for my students and school back home.