Number One Teaching No-No: Students do not equal friends. I’ve learned this over the last year, and now I’ve taught a few new classes where I maintained enough distance between me and my students to be able to do my job and stay in control of the classroom. This was not the case for my first six months or so in China.
When I first came to this school, I was hired with reservations - I only have a bachelor’s degree in English lit and absolutely no training in ESL or anything vaguely related to education. I was lucky to have a connection to get me hired in the first place, and my boss explained that I’d be teaching lower level students as a way to get my feet wet.
I started out teaching two classes. One of them was a class full of kittens, as far as I was concerned. I made Number One Teaching No-No really quickly in that class. You shouldn’t make friends with your students. It will cause all kinds of classroom management issues and heartbreak further down the line, as we shall see. In my defense, though, I spent the first few months in China feeling freaked out, wildly intimidated by my coworkers, homesick, and a little lonely. Besides Chris, my students were pretty much the only people I felt really comfortable talking to. And I think they picked up on some of that, because this was the class that threw me a birthday party, showed me their pet snake after school, brought me candy, and occasionally greeted me with applause when I walked into the room. They were the ones who helped me get a grip on China - they answered my questions, taught me Chinese words, and gave me a better sense of modern Chinese attitudes than I was getting in my first furtive, stressful trips to the supermarket. So I owe them. I taught them every academic term since I’ve been here except for one, and now I’m teaching them again with a few changes in the attendance roster, which I’ll explain later.
Then there was the other class. This was the lowest level class in the school, consisting of fifteen boys. Their classroom smelled like a gym sock in hell, and the only English they could use with any kind of confidence was obscene. I’d been in there maybe five minutes before deciding that this was NOT a job for the rookie, but rather for the educational equivalent of a green beret. It didn’t help that some of them were over six feet tall, and every time they’d stand up I’d suddenly feel extremely small. They slept in class, refused to do their work, talked loudly in Chinese over me, once memorably showed up to class completely sloshed after a liquid lunch, or appeared with casts on their arms and black eyes from fistfights over girls.
The first term that I taught them was absolutely awful. I left the class feeling like I’d been wrestling bears for two or three hours, limping away to lick my wounds and have mini nervous breakdowns. Finally, one day I lost it on them, and chewed them out like nobody’s business. I’m not a screamy person, and the shock factor worked. Perfectly. Then the tentative conversations after class started happening - they couldn’t understand directions because the language was too difficult or I spoke too fast, they couldn’t make sense of the grammar rules and got so frustrated with it that they stopped trying, they had the feeling that they were attempting something impossible, etc. It got better after that (although there were a few repercussions of my righteous fury). I switched my tactics - instead of getting flustered by the wildly inappropriate comments, I started shooting back (which earned me some street cred), I explained parts of speech using the multifunctional f-bomb, I redesigned the textbook content to revolve around things they cared about (hip hop, World of Warcraft, basketball, etc.), Chris and I went to KTV (karaoke) with them, and I started really priding myself of being capable of teaching them. I thought I’d figured out a way to make things stick in their heads. I started thinking of them as my Lost Boys, I knew their personal problems, I figured out how to read them and see the difference between laziness and frustration, and I was dumping HUGE amounts of personal time into supplementing lessons with extra stuff to be sure they understood. By the end of last school year, I would have jumped off a cliff for those guys if I had to, and I think they would have followed me if I asked them to.
Then almost all of them failed their final exam. They got the opportunity to resit it, and some of them made it through, some of them didn’t. I was bummed out by this, and when I got back from my short summer vacation, I got called in to the boss’s office to discuss their future. They wound up taking a three week summer class and then retaking that level’s exam. I spent that three weeks wracking my brains for new ways to present the material and giving motivational speeches that would have made generals proud. And this, the most problematic class in the school behaviorally and academically, worked HARD for it. They were taking notes, asking questions, and acting like a completely different class. Finally, they took the exam, and all but two of them passed it. Whew. It was a better outcome than I was braced for.
We had a week off for orientation, and I was totally psyched about coming back to class and giving high fives and starting Level Four with them. Seven of them had moved up to a higher class, leaving eight with me. But there was another aspect of their program that I had no idea was lurking out there to trip them up. These students are studying in a foundation program. They passed the level exam for that program, but there was more to it. They also need a mark of five on their IELTS score (American friends: like the TOEFL) or higher to get their visa. If they don’t have the IELTS score to get a visa, the foundation program won’t do them any good. And they just took their IELTS tests, and their scores were too low.
The school decided that the class shouldn’t move on to Level Four. I understood the reasons for this - they’d barely passed their exams, and in a practical sense, the lower IELTS score meant more than the ok exam score. The school wanted to give them the best shot possible for getting into a foreign university, which meant a hardcore focus on IELTS and English. So they got taken out of their program, and put into intensive language training - no more foundation program, no more subjects, strictly classes in IELTS and English. I found out about this on Tuesday, the day before classes started.
They were NOT happy when I went to class on Wednesday afternoon. They’d found out the news that morning, and were moping around the corners of the classroom when I came in. I’d spent hours the night before putting together a curriculum of sorts, which I’m pretty proud of, to replace the level four textbook they wouldn’t be using, and several other hours freaking out on Chris over the matter, and I had this complicated vocabulary/writing exercise/role playing thing all photocopied and planned out. The class trudged to their seats, and I asked them sympathetically how they were. The universal answer was, “bad.” One of them told me that they were all planning to leave the school, because they couldn’t see much of a point in staying.
Now, I rationally know that these students had massive problems with study skills, motivation, and what have you, and they’d been floundering in all of their other subjects. But I defy you to learn that a class you’ve been teaching English for one year hasn’t improved their ENGLISH at all, in one year, and not do the math and come up with a highly plausible common denominator.I felt like I’d let them down (and of course key players have told me that’s not true already) and misled them.
I meant to go into class and be as optimistic and motivational as I could, but one look at their faces and I immediately forgot everything I was supposed to do, and started with “I’m so sorry, I feel like I haven’t done my job well,” and started bawling. NOT professional, at all. And now I know that if you ever want to seriously freak thuggish Chinese youth, just start crying. So they spent a few minutes making me feel better, and then we pretty much just had love fest for the rest of the class. One of them made the comment that they’d bombed the IELTS because “we are all VERY bad men.” “No, no, you are good men!” And all eight of them grinned and said, “NO! BAD!” So we spent a little time giving everyone gangster identities - I had a hitman, a mob boss, an arsonist, a cat burglar, a sociopath, a jewel thief, a ruffian, and a drug dealer by the end of it. We wound up talking about a surprising variety of stuff (art, women’s rights in China, high school, the Olympics, stuff like that). At some point they started addressing me as Anne Jie (Big Sister Anne), which almost set off the waterworks again.
Most of them have left the school by now (and for the record, I have actually done things in class with them since last Wednesday - it was only one day of horsing around). Last term I’d write little stories about them for reading on Fridays (I gave them all superpowers in one, stuck them into western fairy tales in another, stuff like that - it got them to read and get a little bit of new vocabulary in, I guess). I started working on one called Very Bad Men that I’ll never get to give them. So this turned out not to be a touching family comedy about a ragtag group of champions after all, no matter how much I was looking forward to cheering for them at the graduation they didn’t make it to. I don’t really know where they’re headed - I think they want to take cheaper IELTS classes with people who speak Chinese. If they don’t get that IELTS score, there goes the “study abroad” dream crashing to the ground, which depresses me to think about. Some of them wanted to go abroad because their Chinese entrance exams weren’t good enough, and I have no idea what they’re going to do. It’s just been a bad week for me. The good news, I guess, is that by next term I’ll have mostly fresh classes that I will not make the mistake of getting so personally wrapped up in, thereby avoiding massively depressing situations like this.
I got a text message from one of my guys that said, “Anne. I will miss you. You are not my teacher now, you’re my friend.” Damn straight, and that’s probably a better arrangement for everyone.
I got really sad over this.