The Life of a DaJing Teacher

As I spend the days here teaching, observing and hanging out with my DaJing colleagues, I think a lot about their lives both in and out of school and how their lives compare with mine in Seattle. Today, I thought I would give you a little overview of a teacher's life at DaJing High School.  First of all, I have to say that many of the teachers here are super cute and stylish.  Look at the fashionable Chinese teachers, taking a stroll after lunch!  And these English teachers, especially the one with the sparkly lapels on her jacket!  Not all teachers dress like this, but the ones who do are most impressive.  Now, you may ask, Adina, where are the man teachers?  Aren't there any?  The answer is yes, there are male teachers, but there is a really noticeable gender divide here between the male and female teachers.  I'm not saying they don't EVER hang out, but in the dining room at breakfast and lunch it's almost like an unspoken apartheid situation.  The male teachers all sit on one side of the dining room, and the female teachers don't seem to go over there.  So of course, I haven't gone over there myself.  Ben Lee spent all this time telling me how great VP Luo is, how amazing, how articulate and scholarly and I was really excited to spend time talking to him but I'm scared to even approach him because he's over there with the male teachers.  I do have to say, however, that the head of the school is a woman, and she sits with the administrators at lunch - and the two vice principals are men.  I wanted to take some photos of the male teachers, especially this one guy who wears the same grey and black tweed jacket every single day, and also the "coach" dude who has a crew cut and wears a track suit, but frankly, I'm too intimidated to go up to them. So I just hang with the female teachers.

A day in the life of a DaJing teacher starts with arrival through the main gates of the school around 7:15 in the morning.  Some teachers have a before school class to teach that starts at 7:15; other teachers go eat breakfast in the cafeteria.  As you can see in the picture, there is a big gate in front of the school, where security guards have to let you in. It's an impressive structure.

Jiang Yan arrives through the gate

 Here are some teachers eating breakfast. That lady on the right is Gao Jianren, who came to visit Northwest.  I went to her class on Confucius and Lao Tze and she is one dynamic lecturer!

Teachers eating breakfast.

Teachers, have their own offices, but they are more like cubicles.   They can be very noisy and hectic, even noisier and more hectic than the Humanities offices, if you can believe that!  Teachers are often seen wearing headphones (like Scott and Cal do) to cancel out noise so they can get work done.  The students are always rushing in and out, especially during the breaks (they have a 15 minute break between classes) and at lunchtime, to get extra help, ask questions, and so forth.

teachers working in their cubicles

students getting help  in the office

They also have these extra little rooms that teachers can go to hang out, drink tea and grade papers.

My friend Eva in her office

A student comes in with a question

teachers grading papers

As you can see, there isn't much room. Relationships between students and teachers are friendly, although teachers have up to 40 students in a class, so there isn't a lot of time for hanging out.  They have constant stacks of really boring grading, which involves just seeing if a student answered correctly on a multiple choice question or filled in the blanks correctly.  There's not a lot of controversy or spice in the lessons.  Teachers teach from the textbooks, and don't have a lot of choice about the material.  One of the aspects of my job that I enjoy most is hashing out the details of assignments or other parts of the curriculum with my colleagues, trying to determine what is most important, what is the main idea, what do we want the students to come away with at the end of the unit.  That part of the job doesn't really exist for a teacher here, unless you get to a higher administrative level and then you go to a meeting with the district to discuss the textbook.  And I do have to say that the textbooks, as far as I have seen are totally random and bizarre.  Here is one of my favorite pictures, from a lesson about tea, depicting American (or I guess probably British) teachers:

Swanky western teachers during a break

Another thing I really enjoy about my job is the relaxed atmosphere of the classroom, the way the students feel free to speak up, to ask questions, to state their opinion, to challenge their classmates and even challenge me.  If you are a teacher at DaJing, here is the view you have of your class:

As you can see, their heads are down and they are all in rows.  It's a real challenge to get students to even answer the simplest yes or no question.  I have to run down the aisle and tap them on the arm just to get them to look up!  I can't tell if they understand, if they like it or not, if they are learning anything, if they got anything out of a lesson.  Later they will tell their teachers they enjoyed it very much, or it was a "happy" class, but by the blank looks on their faces you would never know.

Down on the main floor, they seem to have this "teacher hall of fame."  I'm not sure what it actually is, and I sort of don't want to know because I'm afraid it's NOT a teacher hall of fame, but I love it.

It's a row of pictures and text with various teachers in teaching type poses, looking up from books or down at papers, smiling on vacation, etc. and I wish we could have something like this at Northwest. But you'd probably way we suffer from too much hubris already, whereas Chinese teachers seem to work harder at the tedious tasks and less at the "grappling with ideas" tasks that we love.  In that way, their lives mirror those of the students, who work hard, keep their heads down and do a lot of tedious preparation for the exams.  The teachers spend a lot of time teaching to the tests, getting through the point in the textbook they are assigned to cover and grading the exams.  This is not to say there isn't some room for fun a creativity in this.  For instance, when my friend Eva was teaching a lesson on reading comprehension, the subject was Pele, and she put together a really fun lesson where we got to see pictures of Pele and watch him score some winning goals.  But WHY was there a lesson about Pele?  It was so random!  And of course, the students are fun.  Even with the pressure they are under with all the homework, the memorization, the tests, the tedium, their lovely spirits shine through. They love to catch me in the hall and ask me questions, or just say hi and practice their English.  They love to play basketball and badminton and table tennis, tease each other, eat noodles and play on their phones.  It a real treat to be one of the DaJing teachers, even for such a short time.  If I were Chinese, I'd probably still want to teach, despite the differences between our two cultures.