Uncomfortably numb

"Slow Boat": how appropriate for the interweb's laziest blogger. Oh well, better late than never I guess.


It's been fourteen months now and I seem to speak less Chinese than I did when I first flew out. My teaching's not getting any better either. I tell you what: platitudes aside, teachers don't half earn their money. He Li, my Chinese teacher, organises her lessons in a way that I can only dream of. But it leaves me feeling like not only a rubbish student but a rubbish teacher too.

You'd think I had the dream gig here with only seven 90 minute classes to teach and a working week that begins at 1pm on Monday and ends at midday Wednesday. I spend the other four days of the week, however, planning and fretting wildly about the next week's lessons: it just isn't fun anymore.

Moving up to a university post hasn't been the panacea that I'd hoped. It turns out I had better and more interesting conversations with my high school students last year than I do now with first and second year uni students.

Of course I can't blame the students for me simply being out of my depth but I do wonder what even the best teacher in the world would do to teach 'British Culture' to a class of fifty youngsters with no interest whatsover in the subject and - this is the key thing - whose English is barely good enough to say their own name. And what's the point anyway? It's like me taking chemistry lessons in French: why make the subject even more difficult than it was in the first place?

You wouldn't believe the different strategies I've tried to drill some Britishness into my three Sophomore classes. It began with lecture style classes using the text book they'd given me: a very dry tome with key historical, political and geographical facts about the home countries. Lead balloon time. I tried using ready made culture lessons provided by the British Council but was told (by my students) that they were pretty dull too. What they wanted was informaton about more everyday things in Britain - what it's like to live there. Okay, then. How about a lesson about British food? British social customs and manners? Zzzzzzzzzzzz.


Last gasp: I'll show a movie (damn! I mean a film...) and then discuss the cultural references. Easy for the students, easy for me, luvly jubbly. Ha! What a nightmare it's been. My snide copy of Braveheart wouldn't play for a start so I went to Plan B: Notting Hill. Or Notting Bloody Hill as I affectionately know it now.

The disasters had only just begun. The computers in the so-called 'multimedia classrooms' had no DVD software installed so I had to install my own. (These are the same 'multimedia classrooms' that have chalk blackboards instead of whiteboards or even overhead projectors.) These multimedia classrooms have been designed with floor to ceiling windows on two sides so, even with the curtains closed, the room is constantly bathed in light which means that no one can see what's being projected on the screen. The final straw was the projector itself literally blowing up.

I could see its point.

It's taken three weeks to show the film. Three long, long weeks. I've seen it seven times - without counting the other times I watched it at home to prepare. Safe to say it's not one of my all time favourite flicks.


University over here isn't anything like at home. It's just a continuation of being at school. They're not young adults, just older kids. And they're treated like children too: single sex dorms; compulsory exercise at 6.30 every morning; I even have to take a class register at the beginning of every lesson.

Then there's the unreality of the whole business. At the end of the year, no one's going to fail the course. People don't fail here. There's a whole spectrum of universities to apply to with the best students going to universities like Sichaun University ('Chuan Da') and the lesser ones going to institutions further down the list. Institutions like Sichuan Normal University ('Chuan Shi').

Funny, at the beginning of the year, I asked them to fill in a questionnaire which asked them, among other things, why they wanted to study English. Some said it was "the lesser of several evils", some said it was "because my parents told me to". Terrific. I'd been told I would be teaching "highly motivated English majors". Ha! About as highly motivated as I am for the first lesson on a Tuesday at eight o'clock in the morning.

I was invited to a party by some of my students last week. Boy, is it not like Britain. This was no ill organised and random drink fest with loud music, lashings of beer and the odd bowl of salted peanuts. Instead, I was led by a couple of girls into a vast lecture theatre filled with 300 seated youngsters all primed to 'just go crazy' as just as soon as they're told it's okay to. The word 'random' didn't come into it at all. There was a carefully planned programme of sixteen singing, dancing, poetry-reading and comedy-sketch acts.

I was given two glow-in-the-dark glow-sticks to wave as though I was at a Bon Jovi gig - and a girl. Oh, what fun I had waving them to karaoke-ing students, casually murdering every song they sang. No one seemed to care that the microphone didn't work, that the singing was out of tune and that this was about as much fun as (what's the most tedious thing I can think of?) attending one of my lessons.