Teacher Talk

Now that freshman military training has ended, I have finished my first real week of teaching - all 10 classes (7 oral, 3 writing).  Each class is an hour and a half, and 2 of my 10 classes are actually extra ones that the department foisted on all the foreign teachers because one teacher didn't show up.  My students are all engineering or economics majors, except my extra English majors class, who are wonderful for obvious reasons. I have no textbook, so it's been a bit of flying by the seat of my 裤子.

I've had my sophomore writing classes for 5 weeks now, and we're moving into writing 4 paragraph argumentative essays. (We'll see how this goes...)  Both Kim and I completely revised our teaching philosophy regarding writing - at first we planned on doing sentences, then paragraphs, then outlines, then essays, but I think I'll just see what they can muster up, then tear it apart and rebuild it via peer edits and one-on-one sessions.  I prepped them by doing what has become one of my favorite lessons: an introduction about the death penalty, having them brainstorm pros and cons (with the emphasis being the importance of thinking about both sides of an issue), and then a debate about a topic they get to vote for: same-sex marriage, human cloning, or torture for national security.  The majority of my first class wanted to debate same-sex marriage (and I could tell by the looks on some of my students' faces that they were thrilled to be assigned to the "for" side, interestingly enough).   My next two classes pretty unanimously chose human cloning.  During their pro/con brainstorm sessions it really took some prodding on my part to get them to think about the other side's point of view, yet ironically they are all masters of the "on one hand...on the other hand..." sentence structure. Sigh.  Trying to get them to move from neutral safe territory into the critical analysis mindset, but that will take changing the entire Chinese educational system.

For my freshman oral classes, I am trying to bust right into some meatier topics by the second class.  My two guinea pig classes on Friday were fascinated, I think, I hope (don't want to give myself too much credit yet) by my lesson on the American melting pot vs. salad bowl (assimilation vs. multiculturalism). I don't think they've had much American history.  It wasn't as much of a discussion generator as I had hoped (understandable in retrospect as I am sure they don't spend much time thinking about assimilation - 98% of my students are of the Han majority), but in both classes I was interested to find that the few students with opinions disagreed about whether China can be described as having a policy of assimilation or multiculturalism (China has 56 ethnic groups, with the overwhelming majority being Han Chinese). 

I need have my students do things like practice verb tenses, but I hope that we can cover some more thought-provoking (but not too politically provocative!) topics along the way. I would really love to see what my students think (or if they even know) about a Chinese dissident winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but I'm not sure if that's allowed in the classroom setting...