End of My First Week- The Academic Side

This week has flown by and between teaching, observing classes and sightseeing I haven't had time to write, but there is so much to tell!  The students and teachers and I are slowly getting to know each other, engaging in conversations about life, family and, of course, our two education systems.

Students and teachers of "senior 1, class 1"

Every day (except Thursday) I have taught at least one class. Several of the Chinese teachers of English also attend my lessons, as they are eager to see how we do it differently in the United States, or at least at Northwest School.  So far, I have taught lessons on persuasive, comparative and narrative writing as well as critical reading. My favorite class, however, was when I got to teach the group of kids (not exactly a class, but a mix of kids from various Senior Two classes) who visited us in Seattle and did the Oedipus at Shanghai project.  We have started reading Antigone and are having just as much fun with that as we did with Oedipus.  It will be interesting to see if we can discuss issues like civil disobedience as we get to that part in the play next week.

I have also spent a lot of time observing English classes.  I was surprised at first to be joined by a handful of DaJing teachers each time.  I thought they were just being polite, hanging out with me, but in fact, the teachers here spend a lot of time visiting and observing each other's classes.  A LOT of time, like a couple of periods a day.  Of course, one of the main reasons for this is that the DaJing teachers only have two classes per day to teach on average.  They spend a huge amount of time on lesson planning. The rest of the time, they meet with students or observe other teachers; they consider this observation an essential part of their jobs!  It helps them to improve as teachers on a daily basis when they see what other teachers are doing.  Not only can they give feedback to their colleagues, but they can incorporate ideas from the classes they observe.  They were dumbfounded when I told them that teachers at Northwest hardly ever observe each other.  Even when we participate in the peer observation program, we might go see one or two of the other person's classes.  At least, that's what I did when I participated.  It might be different with other NWS teachers, but I simply don't have time to watch other people teach for 2-3 periods a day.  Here, though, it goes without saying that teachers will observe each other throughout the day, week and academic year. I hope, when I return, I can at least try to visit other teachers' classes a little bit more often.

12th grade exam prep

So how are our classes different?  Chinese teachers teach from textbooks, which mostly have fill-in-the-blanks or multiple choice questions.  Even if the students are trying to find, say, the main idea of a paragraph, they will have the choice of "main idea sentences" to select, which means, in English class anyway, they don't spend a lot of time putting ideas into their own words.  Many answers are copied from the text, and longer essays might be cobbled together from material they have read.  I have been "grading" a stack of papers  about holidays around the world, and was intrigued when a student wrote, "for a single dog" Valentines Day can still be fun.  Then I read another paper, and another, that used this same expression (which I guess is some sort of slang that I've never heard).  Students are encouraged to copy phrases straight from the text.  When students get into "senior three," which is the equivalent of 12th grade, they spend almost every class preparing for the big college entrance exam.  This means the teacher becomes more of an "exam coach," much like (I guess) your Kaplan or Princeton SAT coach.  They have developed techniques for the students to try out to address various types of questions on the exams.

student reaction to exam prep

 As you might imagine, this makes class tedious, repetitive and exhausting for students and teachers alike.  I joined in with the students in practicing a few of the questions and then reviewing them.  It was like doing a word puzzle, where you had to find the part of the passage they were looking for and then rearrange the words, change the grammar or copy a phrase word for word.  I got some of them wrong!  When we went over the answers, the teacher used amazingly obscure grammar points (which the students seemed to be familiar with) like "post appositive attributive" to explain how to rearrange the words.

I started wondering if the students had the opportunity in other classes to express their thoughts and opinions.  For instance, I could see how in English class, they have to be sure to understand vocabulary and grammar, and to respond to these highly specified test questions.  But what about Chinese class, which would be the equivalent of our English class?  Would they be able to write personal narratives, opinion pieces, and so forth?  Would they engage in discussion about the text? I decided to ask Mrs. Gao, the Chinese teacher, if I could come and observe her class.  She was super excited and said she would be teaching about Lao Tze, who she knows I like.  (One of the only Chinese phrases I can say is the beginning of the Tao Te Ching.)  Next week, I will go see her classes (of course, they will be in Chinese so I will only be able to get the gist of things, but it's amazing, as I said in my last post, how much gist you can get) and also spend some time shadowing other teachers and really learning about their days.  I will then be able to report more about this.  Until, then, have a great weekend and be sure to read my other posts, which will explain more about the nuts and bolts of life here as well as some of the fun activities I did this week outside of school.