Teaching in China

Originally posted October 9th, 2009

Firstly sorry for taking so long to get this post out, there has been a lot going on during the past few weeks. Steve and I have moved into a new apartment with another English teacher. His name is Eddy and he's from the States. The walk to work is longer but the place is much nicer and there is even some greenery in the form of a small park! Anyway enough of that unimportant stuff your here to read about teaching...

So last time I left you I'd only done one day of teaching and it all went by in quite a blur so hopefully now, I've been here over a month, I can give a better account. For the first two or three weeks I worked Tuesday to Saturday. The Saturday classes were all the same type as in my last blog though thankfully they got easier from week to week, mainly because I was growing in confidence and because I had a better idea of what the classes were capable of. I've stopped Saturdays now though as I was covering until Eddy arrived. I work Monday to Friday from 9-5. In the mornings I have around 2 hours of teaching which basically consists of going round 9 classes and drilling vocabulary, singing songs, reading stories etc. to the children. The teaching material is provided by the school and progresses from week to week. The classes last between 5 and 15 minutes and the age range is from 17months to 6 years old. From 11 till 1 we have a break and get our lunch. Then from 1-4 we do admin work. Our school is part of a large chain and our school contains the development team for new materials i.e. books. At the moment our afternoons are spent editing a new set of books that are destined for publication throughout China. We're also writing the audio accompaniment to the series of books. Then from 4-5 Steve and I give one-to-one lessons to the bosses two sons Matthew and Mark. These are really good as it gives us more freedom than normal classes and we can give our students our undivided attention, so naturally they're very productive and rewarding.

Teaching children, especially ones so young, is really fun but can be very challenging. At first a lot of the youngest kids just cried when we went to class but they're used to us now. It's really important to be happy and enthusiastic no matter how tired you are but most of all aim to make classes as fun as possible whilst still teaching the children what they need to learn. A lot of what we're doing day to day boils down to common sense and rather than centering on lesson plans it's more of a case of being flexible and adapting as, invariably, lessons are different from what you expect. Quite often we don't know what we are teaching till we arrive at the class and then we just have to get stuck in. My advice to anyone hoping to teach young children would be to find as many games as possible from the internet etc. and build a repertoire of material that you can always use. That way you're always prepared even if a lesson goes badly and you have to scrap it you can at least salvage something and keep the children interested.

As always if anyone has any questions about the teaching, or anything else, let me know!

• teaching
• China