To set up incident number 1, I need to explain my oral English examination format. Modeling the Cambridge Business English Certificate exams, I meet two (sometimes three) students at a time for about 20 minutes. I test them on vocabulary and pronunciation, then give them a topic on the spot to talk about between themselves for a few minutes. There is usually time left for me to ask them a few questions to verify listening comprehension and coach them on pronunciation issues.

Students sign up for these sessions in class about two to three weeks in advance. With more than 200 students to evaluate, I’m booked pretty tight.

A couple of days ago, I was scheduled to meet three girls — roommates, as it turns out — who I will call A, B, and C. And B are among my best students in their class; their spoken English is not perfect, but they can chatter away at fairly high speed in English. C is a less motivated student, and much quieter in class. If students had been picking members for softball teams, I suspect she would have been one of the last ones that one team would have reluctantly picked. You know what I mean. I certainly do.

Anyway, C told me that A and B, seeing that their roommate (and supposed “best friend”) was the odd girl out, told her she could join them for the examination.

The hour of destiny arrived and I found only C outside my office waiting. She explained, abashedly, that her “best friend,” A, had called her 20 minutes before the appointment and told her that, since C’s English skills were so poor, A and B didn’t want to share their exam time with her. She should meet with me alone.

Mind you, this poor girl, C, had to explain this to me in English with less than 20 minutes to prepare. She was able to do it lucidly and unambiguously, and even request that I not tell her fair-weather friends that she had shared this information with me. Poor English skills? Uh-uh, girl friend.

OK. They aren’t perfect. She has some pronunciation issues. She confused the word “taxi” with “test,” which had me totally confounded for about five minutes. Why would two girls agree to share a cab with her, then at the last minute tell her to get out? When I realized taxi = test, it made a lot more sense. Well, in a way.

C suffers from a serious lack of self confidence. She swore to me that her pronunciation was poor, yet did as well as, and in one case better than, A or B. Her original college plan, she told me, was to study interior design, but her parents required her to study English on the mistaken assumption that English majors stand a better chance in the crowded Chinese job market than design majors. They clearly don’t hang around with the rich folks who inhabit the big cities here with ginormous flats begging for some original design work.

[Amateur's aside: Interior design in China is, I am sorry to report, boring. I love my friends here dearly, but their homes are stark and cookie-cutter like. I feel like I've been transported back to a 1980s Architectural Digest photoshoot every time I visit someone's new home.]

C told me that she had to obey her parents, though she does not especially love English. Convinced that her skills were atrocious, she was visibly surprised when I told her that, in fact, her pronunciation was not at all poor — I have a few freshmen who are nearly unintelligible — and that with some effort, she could overcome her vocabulary and grammar issues. I also suggested she pick up a sketch pad and some pencils and start drawing in her spare time. The five-week winter holiday starts next week, after all.

As I promised, it didn’t let on to A and B that C had spilled the beans, nor did I point out to any of the three that their internal divisions totally fouled up the rest of my schedule for that afternoon. I’m still debating how to address the schedule fuck-up with the class next term without pinpointing the ABC team as the culprit.

On to incident 2. The night after the ABC caper, I was chatting with my friend, K, on QQ. In the course of our conversation about her employment woes, which I will share later to give you an idea of how Chinese bosses work her, I told her about these girls. K asked me if they were roommates, and when I said they were, replied, “Oh, then it definitely wasn’t about her English. It was some girl thing.”

Then K offered her own experience as a for-instance. Basically, in their senior year, one of her roommates would spread nasty gossip about her when she was out of the room while the girls played cards. When K returned to the dorm, the others would fold up the card game and go about their nightly ablutions, not speaking one word to K. This went on for months, until their graduation.

I have no idea why that one roomie had it out for K. Maybe it was some personality problem — K, dear girl, is rather outspoken — or jealousy about K’s academic prowess. Or something else that I, as a mortal man, will never fathom because I’m male and they aren’t.

It gave me added insight into my friend, and her classmates, whom I have all taught, but it also made me realize that people are people, no matter where they live or how they grew up. I suppose that’s good to know, but in these two cases, very sad.

I made the Community Spotlight at dKos!

As of right now (1:30 am EST), it’s had 58 comments since I posted it yesterday. And its plea for foreign teachers has netted three responses so far. Not bad for a couple hours of work.

Last term, my workload was relatively easy: two periods of Western Culture and six periods of Oral English a week. Nevertheless, a lot of my time was spent prepping for the Culture class. I felt somewhat guilty that I was not putting in more time prepping for the Oral English classes, especially for the freshmen, but I had organized the classes well enough that things pretty much took care of themselves.

This term, I have more work to do. The juniors have me for two subjects: British Literature and Academic Writing. Needless to say, I’ve got several months of hardcore reading and writing ahead of me. The sophomores will still meet me twice a week for Oral English, and I hope to try some new activities to enliven the classes even more. The freshmen will have a different foreign teacher, since we each typically teach eight periods (16 classes) a week.

I spent part of my mostly indolent winter holiday scouring Amazon for books to help me with my classes and generally with my teaching. Maybe I’ve mentioned it before, but Chinese universities give their foreign teachers little support. The expectation is that, as a native speaker, you already know all there is to know about English, so why give you textbooks in advance or suggested syllabi? The office tells you, “Your subject is X. The books will arrive a week before classes start — maybe.” And that’s it.

Fortunately, I spent 20-odd years as the sole physics teacher in a tiny college-prep high school. I was pretty left to my own devices, and I’m used to flying by the seat of my pants. But there, at least I could choose my own textbooks. Here, I get whatever the department chooses, and as best as I can tell, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the selection of the texts.

The Oral English classes use a textbook series from the UK, Inside/Out, which are really quite good. But these books are designed for all-in-one English as a Second Language classes, where adult students learn reading, writing, speaking and listening at once. Many of the cultural references are to things British, and there’s a definite Eurocentric slant to the activities. (My students, for example, have very little experience with dating, trying to pick up someone at a party, or hanging out in pubs and football games.) If I were teaching ESL in England, Inside/Out would be a great choice, I think.

But I don’t. I teach English as a Foreign Language (I discovered over the holiday that there is a distinction between ESL and EFL. I never knew. Duh.) in China. My students have separate classes for grammar, speaking, writing, reading and listening. There is little coordination among the various subjects, and I really have no idea what they learn in the other classes. I have skipped most of the written stuff in Inside/Out and use the book’s units as prompts for oral work. I’m not happy with this arrangement, but it has worked, if somewhat ineffectively.

(Brag moment: an American I met this weekend in Fenghuang complimented me on my standard and clear American pronunciation. Maybe the 30 years in Kentucky cancelled out the New York patois somehow. So, I guess I’m an ideal EFL teacher??)

The text for the Western Culture class was just plain abysmal, so I had a yeoman’s task facing me to compensate for the abysmal-ness. I am not expecting much better this term, so I decided to get my own texts.

Here’s my personal reading list.

British Literature
The Norton Anthology of English Literature (I only have volume 1 so far)
The Collected Works of William Shakespeare — in one volume! I found it at Barnes & Noble.
An Outline of English Literature (Longman)

Academic Writing
The Macmillan Reader
The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) — a gold mine of resources

Teaching EFL in general, but stressing spoken English
Teaching English as a Foreign or Second Language (Jerry G. Gebhard)
Fluency Through TPR Storytelling (Contee Seely)
Using the Board in the Language Classroom (Cambridge)
Live Action English

The Gebhard book is a concise and very helpful resource. He mixes practical ideas for activities in class with more theoretical discussions of methodology. I wish I had had it two years ago. He’s got some fun ideas on how to form student pairs and groups, how to remember names, how to break the ice on the first day of class, and how to get students to speak. The book also a comprehensive bibliography, which would take me decades to read through. I feel a lot less at sea with this one book.

I am still waiting for the last three books to arrive. I realized while I was packing for the return to China that my luggage was going to be way overweight, so I posted several things ahead of my departure. Of course, they are probably still on the way here.

The Norton Anthology and the Longman Outline have been useful to reacquaint myself with British Lit. I studied the modern novel for my CompLit concentration, so my foundation in the older stuff is pretty weak. (I have read some of Chaucer, though, with John V. Fleming as my professor. You should be impressed. Look him up.) The Outline is really brief, just 170 pages, while the Norton tome (volume 1) is about 3000 pages long. I hesitate to order the second volume. Shipping costs alone will kill me.

The Macmillan Reader will be a great resource for the writing class, although I expect the students will have another text. If anything, it will give me some support as I organize the course. I have taught the same students writing before, but it seems not much of what we covered stuck in their heads. So, I reckon I’ll have to review quite a bit, especially about the plagiarism part. A lot about the plagiarism part. Chinese students have no conception of the idea, at least as we understand it in the West.

Anyway, back to the original topic. There is a lot more to teaching EFL than meets the eye. (My former language teacher colleagues, Sarah and Angela, are probably laughing their heads off now at this rather brainless statement.) When I was here for my first year, I figured I would just do the best I could with as little as I had. But after two years going on three, I’ve realized I need to educate myself if I am going to be decent teacher. There are no pedagogy classes here, after all, and I was trained as a science teacher, not a foreign language teacher. So I have to make up for my deficiencies.

By the way, if you want to help me in my studies, you can always visit my Amazon wishlist. If you visit Amazon through the search box on the main page on this blog, I also get a little money.

Western Culture and Civilization
NAME_______________________________
Student ID ____________________________
2008 G1 and G2
First test, Ancient Greece, 22 October 2010

IDENTIFY THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE AND PLACES:
1. Athens

2. Sparta

3. Troy

4. Achilles

5. Odysseus

6. Aristotle

7. Plato

8. Eratosthenes

9. Sophocles

10. Aristophanes

 TEST CONTINUES ON THE NEXT PAGE 
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (Use your own paper for these, please):
11. Ancient Greece fostered the first known republic and the first known democracy in the world. Where were these political experiments, exactly? Give a brief description of how each system of government was organized.

12. Socrates was one of the earliest and most influential of the ancient philosophers. What were his core beliefs?

13. Give two examples of the Greeks’ contributions to mathematics and science. Discuss each one briefly.

14. What was the basic story or theme of Homer’s Iliad? Of Homer’s Odyssey?

15. Why is the civilization and culture of the ancient Greeks so important to the West?

BONUS POINTS: Match the Greek god or goddess to his or her attributes.(10 points maximum)

1 _____	Ares	A	The first woman
2______	Aphrodite	B	Creator of the first man, bringer of fire
3______	Zeus	C	The god of war
4 _____	Hades	D	The goddess of the harvest
5 _____	Poseidon	E	The messenger god
6 _____	Herakles (Hercules)	F	The king of the gods
7 _____	Hermes	G	The king of the sea
8 _____	Prometheus	H	The goddess of love and beauty (and desire)
9 _____	Pandora	I	The king of the underworld
10 ____	Demeter (Ceres)	J	A son of Zeus, and a great hero

JISHOU, HUNAN — Classes have been in session for two weeks now. It’s taken me a while to build a head of steam for blogging. Been a little busy, as you will see.

As was the case last year, I am teaching 16 classes a week (that’s eight groups of students for 100 minutes at a go), but with some changes in subjects and students. This term, I am teaching oral English to the freshman and sophomore undergraduates majoring in Business English, and Western Culture and Civilization to the juniors in Business English.

None of the juniors have oral English classes anymore, which befuddles me, but apparently It’s the Way Things Are Done Here™, according to fellow foreign teachers at other schools. The Business English students have a course in public speaking, but the English education majors — who will presumably be teaching English — have no more English language classes. More about that later.

Previously, my writing classes were the biggest consumer of my prep time, what with reading essays and diaries and plotting more ways to get my students to write English. This term, it’s the Civ class that takes the prize.

The last time I learned anything about ancient Greece and Rome was maybe (if I can remember correctly) in junior high school, which was, oh, about 40 years ago. And for some reason, I’ve always been more interested in medieval history than ancient history, so I’ve got some pretty huge gaps in my cultural background knowledge. (Confession: I tried to read both the Iliad and the Odyssey, but never got through them. And don’t even ask me about The Republic or The Aeneid. Not yet anyway.)

Once we reach the Middle Ages, I’ll feel a little more secure, but there is still a lot of history I need to review.

Adding to my workload is the rather inadequate text we are using, which covers 3,000 years of Western culture in about 380 pages. There are no pictures, no maps, no diagrams — just lots and lots of words, names and dates. Most of the students have never learned anything about Western history, so this book is like Greek to them. (Ahem.) Despite being written by Chinese authors in English, the reading level is miles above their current reading comp skills, so I need to supplement it big time.

It’s not a bad text, really. To its credit, it spends a chapter each on Judaism and Christianity, and tries to summarize the OT and the NT. (The summaries are not that cogent — for some bizarre reason it reprints most of Revelation verbatim — so I have to be a Biblical scholar now, too. Oy vay.) But there is one major omission. In discussing the Enlightenment, the text takes pains to highlight the French Revolution as the most important consequence of the Enlightenment, but says nothing about the American Revolution which preceded (and inspired) it.

Oh, and for you history teachers, there is a noticeable Marxist slant to its historical analysis. The Renaissance and Reformation was the first time the bourgeousie were able to fight against the “feudalistic autocracy and theological yoke” of the aristocracy and the Church, for example.

I’m not bothered so much by the slant, as by the dearth of visually appealing graphics. So, my lectures by necessity need to be illustrated, requiring me to spend hours finding images on the ‘Net when I’m not poring over ancient Greek and Roman lit and philosophy. It’s like I’m back in school again.

My first lecture was about ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and Phoenicia, which the text mentions in passing, but supplies no details about. Next up is “Greek Myth and the Poet Homer.” That’s in the can now, and I am now boning up on Greek politics and philosophy. Plato’s Republic, here I come!

The junior classes have gained nine new students each since last term, all graduates of three-year programs who have earned the chance to become candidates for the bachelor degree. One is a student I taught my first term at JiDa; the others have come from other unis. They will spend two years at JiDa.

Meanwhile, the freshmen have arrived on campus, and are already in their green camos for military training. Our college will either have 120 new students, or 160. We’re still not clear about the numbers, as some 40 of the three-year students just didn’t show up.

Maybe I’ve done this before, but here’s a primer on the Chinese university system, at least as it applies to me here.

First of all, every high school student takes the gaokao (college entrance exam) in June of their final year. They are stratified by the results. The top scorers can go to the premier unis in China, like Beijing University or Fudan U in Shanghai, and lower scorers to lower-ranked schools. In addition, they may qualify to be undergraduates — bachelor-degree candidates who attend school for four years — or what we in the States would term junior-college candidates, who have a three-year course of study, ending in a certificate of completion.

But students can sit for the gaokao again, so we think those missing 40 are waiting for a year to see if they improve their scores and become four-year candidates. It will save them money in the long run. You see, once they arrive at college, the three-year students study on their own to take self-study exams. If their scores are high enough, they can qualify to be bachelor-degree students, finishing their college careers in five years instead of four. There are no guarantees they can pass those exams, so they have to weigh the advantages (and costs) of improving their gaokao score and getting a bachelor degree in four years or enrolling as three-year students, taking self-study exams, and getting a degree in five years.

Now, about those oral English classes. As I mentioned above, none of our juniors are taking English language classes, but they are learning Japanese as their second foreign language. The English ed students on the three-year plan have only 10 hours of class, including teaching methods and English-literature classes. I was dismayed to learn that, for one thing, I would not be teaching them again, and for another, these future teachers were not expected to take any more English language classes. Needless to say, this runs completely contrary to the American curriculum for language teachers-in-training.

Well, my former students have lots of time on their hands, and I could fit two more teaching hours into my load without exceeding my contractual limit of 18 in a week, so I offered to teach them oral English for another term. The answer from my college leaders was a very polite, but very firm, no.

Now I suspect one reason was we don’t have enough classrooms yet to schedule anymore classes, but the other is the educational culture of China. Here, teaching to the test is the head of the educational dragon.

Among the battery of standardized tests these students have to take are the CET-4 and CET-6 English exams, which they take during their first two years. It seems the sole purpose of their English language classes is to give them enough background to pass the tests. If they don’t, it’s their problem, not the college’s. After their second year, there is just no language instruction offered, or even expected.

In other words, the overriding (but unspoken) duty of the university is not to educate students deeply in their chosen major, but to enable them to pass their exams. We are not talking about a liberal arts education here.

Adding to this mentality is the prejudice against the three-year students, who in the eyes of officialdom are not “worthy” of the same opportunities offered the four-year kids. Thus, the junior undergrads have classes with foreign teachers, while the three-year certificate candidates have none. (There are other examples of such discrimination, but I will skip them as they not germane to this post.)

This whole situation just burns me up, but there is not much I can do about it. It’s the Chinese university way, and as a “foreign expert” I have next to zero influence on educational policy, even within my own college.

Fellow foreign teachers elsewhere have advised me to hold English corners for those students, which I started this week. Quite a few students are eager to improve their spoken English, so I’m hoping the turnout will increase as the weeks go by. Right now, they’re too focused on preparing for … that’s right .. standardized tests this weekend.

It’s No Child Left Behind run amok.

Logically speaking, it doesn’t make too much sense. Jishou is a small city, with few (Western-style) amenities. It takes at least two hours to get to the nearest airport. And Jishou University is an also-ran in the rankings of China’s institutions of higher learning.

My friends in bigger cities in China have encouraged me to look elsewhere for teaching jobs in China. One said, “The pay will be better, and the students will be more excellent.”

Yes, and no.

No question about the pay. If I moved to Beijing, or even Changsha, I could probably double my pay pretty easily. Of course, my expenses would also increase, and I’d have the hassles of dealing with big-city life. (Changsha has 5 million people. Beijing has 22 million, making NYC look like a small town.) Big cities have higher costs of living, so it’s questionable whether moving would increase my net income to make moving worth it.

I’ve lived in small cities for the last 32 years, two that were minuscule (60,000 population each), one just a bit bigger than Jishou (800,000) and another of 2.3 million. While it is generally true that living in a small community means a small salary, the trade-offs compensate for the comparative lack of dollars, or yuan.

Food costs are low. Taxi fares are low (since Jishou is so tiny). The people are friendly. If I should decide to rent an apartment, I could probably do it and not go broke. A friend here in Jishou showed me the three-bedroom flat she and her fiancé have bought for ¥240K (about $35,000). It’s got wood floors, a nice kitchen, big bath, and a view of the river. That kind of money might get you a squalid shoebox in Beijing.

And there’s the advantage of being one of very few foreigners around for miles. Western teachers in Beijing or Shanghai are a dime a dozen, and often treated that way by employers. Here, I get considerably more respect.

So I could get more money if I moved, but at a price.

Moving to a bigger market does not mean I would get better students, however. I’ve taught for 25 years, and I can’t imagine finding another group of students who are any more diligent and serious about their futures than the ones I have now.

One of my former JiDa students now working in Beijing told me she’s frustrated with some of her co-workers who graduated from the top unis like Xinhua U or Beijing U. “They’re bookworms,” Jaycee said. “They have no social skills.”

To get into a top university in China, a student has to score very well on the 高考 gaokao, the annual college entrance exam. Parents and schools program teenagers’ lives so densely with classes, tutors and test preparation courses that it’s no exaggeration to say some students have done nothing but study for the two years preceding the gaokao.

So, if you judged my students just on their gaokao scores, you might be inclined to believe they are second- or third-rate students.

But you would be very wrong.

As many American educators (but not politicians) know, test scores do not measure the quality of the student accurately. It’s one reason why American universities and colleges look at other indicators besides an applicant’s SAT or ACT scores: their extracurricular activities, grades, difficulty of courses, school location, family background, to name a few.

While I wish I could say my students are like the children in Lake Wobegon — all above average — I would not trade my students for all the tea in China. Certainly, a few are a little on the lazy side. Others are what we in the States might call “C students” — hard workers but lacking some extra ingredient that enables them to excel. But most of them are very good students. I care for each and every one, no matter what their grades.

Besides, I’ve learned almost all their names, at least their English ones.

My working conditions are pretty damn good, compared to the horror stories I have heard from other foreign teachers. My class sizes at JiDa are modest by Chinese standards, 25 to 40 students, so I can teach them effectively. I get paid on time every month. I get along well with my Chinese colleagues. I have a comfortable apartment, rent-free. If I need a jug of drinking water delivered to my flat, it comes within hours instead of days. My foreign affairs officers are extraordinarily helpful, and they speak really good English.

Then, there are personal considerations. I have friends in town, not just student friends who will someday leave Jishou. I can find my way around town almost entirely on my own. The weather here leaves a little to be desired, but it’s not much different from Louisville’s, and I put up with that for 25 years. The air is clean and breathable (except for downtown). There are no sandstorms, typhoons, earthquakes, or rioting.

It’s not idyllic. What place is? I am mourning the loss of two cherished friendships. One person whom I considered a dear friend has not talked to me since she left for Beijing a year ago. Another friendship I ruined myself by being culturally insensitive about male-female relationships in China; she and I are cordial to one another, but that’s about it for now. And there’s the little issue of being divorced after nearly 24 years of marriage. These feelings of course would follow me wherever I go.

For the time being, I see no reason to pull up stakes and go somewhere else. Been there, done that. As my Facebook page says, I’m happy in Hunan. We’ll see what another year has in store for me here.

One of my former students here in China is getting married next week. This was no big surprise, since she told me it was going to happen sometime this year. Today, when we went to lunch, T. threw me a couple of curve balls.

First, she’s pregnant — one of those happy little accidents that sometimes proceed marriage. Despite the conservative culture of China, being pregnant just before marriage is no big deal, as long as the husband-to-be is still in the picture. The funny thing was, when I accidentally ran into the two of them downtown yesterday, I thought to myself, “T. looks pregnant.”

Now, she’s only three months along, and not showing yet. (T. is very petite, and has not gained weight, so her size was not the reason for my hunch.) But, she was walking a little like a pregnant woman — her shoes were the problem there, she says — and her dress was similar in design to a maternity dress, gathered under her boobs. Purely accidental, T. says; it was a summer dress, and anyway she still has a tiny waist. Despite being wrong about all the obvious visual clues, I was still pretty impressed I had guessed correctly.

Of course, I am also very happy for her and her fiance. It’s my first student baby as a teacher in China! (Hm, that’s one sentence that could be totally taken out of context …) She’s my first Chinese student to have a baby. (Better.) So, I feel like I just passed a milestone in my career here.

Then, while we were eating, T. also revealed that, while she has not hidden her condition from her friends, she has not told her other teachers either about her wedding or her baby. In fact, she doesn’t plan to tell them until after the wedding is over. Her reasoning was merely a matter of practicality: if she invites one teacher, she has to invite all of them, and her family is trying to keep the wedding as small as possible.

So, that means I am the only teacher clued in, which also means I am more a friend than a teacher. I am pleased beyond words, because I’ve become very fond of T. and her family. And now I also must keep my mouth shut in the office for the next week, lest I be responsible for any hurt feelings.

Now, I want to put in a plug for Mark Twain. Yeah, really. Tonight, I gave the next-to-last English lesson to Nikita, the little Ukrainian boy who lives below me. Since we had finished his English textbook from Ukraine, we switched to a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I had found in a Xinhua Bookstore in Beijing last month. It’s an abridged version for Chinese learners of English, with a CD included.

It’s slow going. Nik is 9, and his English vocabulary is still pretty small, and this edition is maybe geared for Chinese middle school students. After three lessons, we have only just finished reading the familiar whitewashing-the-fence escapade. Nik’s Dad reads the story before class, and translates the harder English words and idioms into Ukrainian (or Russian, I’m not really sure). If he gets stumped, he asks me for help. Then Nik reads the story in English, with me coaching his pronunciation and Grisha clarifying the parts Nik doesn’t understand.

Sounds tedious, but it’s great! Nik already knows the story; he’s read it in translation and seen cartoon versions of it. Of course, his Dad knows it, too.

So picture the three of us hovering over this book, and reaching the part where Tom shows off his handiwork to Aunt Polly. Grisha beams with his explanation of the conclusion of the tale. Nik appreciate learning all the details of the same tale he watched yesterday in a cartoon. And I sit there in wonder that a Ukrainian father and son — in China — are happily relishing a tale about a mischievous boy written by an American who died almost exactly 100 years before. (Twain died April 21, 1910, after that year’s apparition of Halley’s Comet.)

Master storytellers give us tales that transcend time and space. Thank you, Mr Clemens. You have blessed us all.