Claaaasses

We’re in our second week of classes here in Fenyang. The first couple classes the first week were terrifying; I felt completely unqualified and incompetent and like what was I thinking, moving to China to teach English? Things have mostly settled down now – we haven’t started teaching all the classes we’ll eventually have, but we’ve mostly gotten the hang of the regular high school classes.

The way it works is we each teach one grade of high school from Monday to Thursday. I’m teaching second grade (which is like the high school juniors), and we focus on reading. Katrina’s teaching listening and speaking to the first grade, and Julie’s teaching writing to the third grade. There’s a lot of emphasis in all the English classes on doing well on a couple exams – the college entrance exam (which apparently only about one in ten students pass the pass/fail rate for which we hear conflicting reports about, but probably fewer than half will pass on the first try) has an English section, and also if they want to try to go to college in America, they have to do well on the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). For each grade, there are 14 classes, and we see each class once a week, so every week we teach basically the same lesson (with some changes depending on the level of each class) 14 times. I think my average class size is somewhere around 60; the biggest is about 70 and the smallest is 44.

The kids seem pretty good-natured and awfully well-behaved. We’re s’posed to read newspaper articles and talk about them, and the kids are not very eager to volunteer answers or speak in front of the class, buuut neither was I. I need to work on speaking more slowly and loudly, and gee whiz I hope I can find articles and activities that are more fun and interesting than the ones I’ve found so far .