Teaching in China: My First Experiences

I’ve been in China now for almost 2 weeks, although honestly it feels like I’ve been here for months. Myself and the other teachers were sent on our way to our BIEE summer camps less than a day after arriving in Beijing and after a nice, if slightly strange opening ceremony featuring all the local authorities and more thanks that should ever be necessary, we were thrown straight in to teaching.

The opening ceremony was a big deal. Many people from important organisations came to see it and there was the most dramatic flag waving that I have ever seen in my entire life (photo from BIEE)

Looking back on that first lesson, it was terrible. Genuinely. We managed to get through without falling over or breaking anything but I doubt the kids learned anything from us in those first few hours. But it’s amazing just how quickly you begin to learn how to structure a lesson, manage a class and keep everything running smoothly when you are teaching lessons for 6 hours a day without any experience. By the end of my 10 days at Tongzhou, I started to feel like actually I wasn’t that bad after all.

The style of teaching in China is so different to in England. They had kids sit in rows and learn by rote. That stereotype isn’t exaggerated. It’s truly sad to see. So, it was really important that our classes were different. Better. We played games, made posters, had the kids get up and talk to one another. After all, that’s why I am here. To help the kids improve their speaking skills. Never had half the kids made a leaflet in school, and none had played games like Splat or Over, Under before. They loved them because it let them learn and have fun in a way that was completely foreign to them.

My class showing off their “Fight Against Pollution” leaflets

A lot of Western media portrays Chinese students as quiet types, following the rules and doing everything the teachers say. That’s not true. While they show their teachers far more respect than we tend to in the West, they can be far from quiet! Once they got comfortable with us and eachother (the classes were made up of a collection of students from 4 schools in the area, so they were making new friends too), our classroom was full of chatting and laughter.

I got to know the kids pretty quickly – it’s hard not to when you are with them for so many hours every day – and they were as much of a mix of introverted and extroverted characters as in the UK. Some students, one boy named Henry especially, were way above where I’d expected. His English was great but what suprised me more was that he read Scientific America for fun. Others, like Rita and Lily with the glasses (we had two Lilys so had to differentiate), were absolute joys to teach. They were funny and smiled so much, always willing to get involved in the activities.

And then there was Rain and Clay… Oh, those two were mad. Clay had one of the lowest abilities in the class but every day managed to make me smile. He was such a cheeky character, always willing to get involved even if he had no idea what was really going on. And Rain, while actually one of the stronger students, was just as much fun. We made the mistake of putting them on the same table and boy was that one hell of an afternoon!

We also had the quiet ones. Helen and Rebecca were great at English but lacked the confidence to really speak it. Nick and Victor were also very good but shy. Over the ten days, each grew and started to volunteer answers which was an incredibly rewarding thing to see. If it is like this after only a few days, I can’t begin to imagine how good it might feel at the end of the year.

Me and some of the students in my class

Saying goodbye was hard. The closing ceremony was something else entirely (but I’ll talk about that in another post). I had tears in my eyes. My co-teacher Nicole cried. Other teachers at our camp fully wept. There were so many pictures and presents and exchanging WeChat numbers that, by the time we got on the bus to come back to our hotel for the final part of our training, we were all completely drained.

I will miss those kids. They were my first class, after all! They taught me a lot about China and what it’s like to be a student here (in short, it’s tough). As exhausting a ten days as they were, it really was a valuable experience to practise planning and teaching lessons in a “safe space” where it was okay to get things wrong and try out new ideas. So, yeah, they will always have a special place in my memories but I am ready now to move on and meet my next set of students. I’m ready to get paid for my troubles, too!