JISHOU, HUNAN, CHINA -- Hello from China. School has also just started here, bringing with it all the attendant hopes and fears of a new year.
The beginning of my school year is quite a bit different from the ones I have seen described at Daily Kos, and not just because I am in China. But teaching is still teaching, no matter where you are.
First off, some details about me. For 23 years I was a high school physics teacher in Lousiville, Kentucky. During seven of those years I was also the school's technology coordinator. In 2000 I taught chemistry and physics in Pretoria, South Africa, as part of the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program.
Before I was a teacher, I was a newspaper reporter. And while teaching, I worked part-time selling computers at two retail stores in the Louisville Metro Area.
Serendipity brought me to this little corner of Hunan province, where I have taught English as a Second Language (ESL) to university students since Sept. 2008. While at my previous school, I befriended our new Chinese teacher, a woman from a city not far from where I am now. Before she returned to China to rejoin her family, I asked her if I could teach English at her university. Six months later, the uni offered me a job, and seven months after that, I boarded a plane for China to start a new chapter in my life.
Jishou is a small city, about 300,000 people, in a largely rural part of Hunan. While there is a lot of active mining going on west of the city, agriculture is the main source of income for most of the population here. As a result, a fair number of my students come from very humble circumstances, and may be the first members of their families to attend university. Additionally, many of my students are members of ethnic minorities, principally the Miao and Tujia, with their own cultures and languages distinct from the majority Han people.
China has made learning English an integral part of students' school and career life. Children start learning English at a very simple level in primary school, but in middle school begin getting more formal instruction in it. China's education system is heavily exam-driven, with high-pressure national exams to enter middle school, university and postgraduate institutions. Testing English proficiency is part of those examinations. Students at university must also take and pass at least one English proficiency exam in order to graduate, and even to be successful at landing jobs once they leave university.
To say that China is starving for qualified English teachers would be an understatement. In fact, the requirements to be a foreign teacher here are astoundingly few: a bachelor's degree, sponsorship for your work visa, and a clean bill of health. Schools will pay more if you have higher degrees, and certainly ESL teaching experience and ESL certification will enable you to make even more money, but pretty much if you speak English and are breathing, you can find a job here.
In the USA, we teachers spend a lot of time keeping our students quiet and focused on classroom tasks. In China, we have the opposite problem -- getting them to talk. School culture here, even in the universities, is teacher dominated. Culturally, teachers are regarded as authority figures worthy of a student's respect if not outright fear. The usual pedagogical method is "teacher talks, students listen." Memorization and rote drills (call by teacher and response by all students at once) are par for the course. Most students have never had the kind of classroom interplay we Americans are accustomed to, with teachers leading discussions and students (well, some students) eagerly trying to get the teacher's attention.
English instruction in the middle schools focuses primarily on reading, grammar and correct pronunciation of the written word. English conversation is never a part of a language class, unless the students are lucky to have a foreign teacher. Chinese teachers put so much emphasis on proper (book) grammar and exact phonetic pronunciation of English words that most Chinese students by the time they reach university are terrified to utter any English other than, "hello" or "nice to meet you." Some of my students have even told me of middle school teachers who would humiliate or punish students if they could not properly imitate the teachers' English or answer questions correctly.
My biggest job last year was to get my students to relax in class, speak as often as possible, and above all, not to fear me. (Some students were serious in their terror that I, as a native speaker, would laugh at their spoken English or not understand a word they said.) Building up their confidence took months; I had to undo years of conditioning.
Those kids are now sophomores, and I will once again teach about 70 of them English composition and another 70 spoken English. In another two weeks, the freshmen will arrive, 140 in all, and I will once again need to deprogram them to be more "American" in class before I can even address their ESL education. (That's right, folks, I will teach 280 students, during 16 hours of class a week.)
I am writing this diary after I watched one of my composition classes write their first essay of the term. Perhaps I am a sentimental old fellow, but I reflected on how much I truly love each and every one of the kids I teach now, and the hundreds I have taught before them. Some of them I know quite well, and can count as dear friends; others are just folks who pass through my classrooms -- our lives touch for a short time and then we move on, hopefully richer for the experience.
Quite a few of my students here did not go home for summer holiday, because their parents are part of the huge migrant workforce here, the people who assemble all those "Made in China" goods you can buy in the USA and elsewhere. Going home would mean living in an empty house. So these students either stayed on campus to find work, or themselves joined the huge migrant workforce, if only for two months.
Some students with wealthier parents could take private English lessons offered by one of the big for-profit English schools here, like New Oriental (Xin Dongfeng). Several of my female students took ballroom dancing lessons all summer, partly to control their weight and (I suspect) partly to enjoy the company of young men.
Other students did go home, maybe to work on their family farms or to tutor local children in English or other subjects, or more typically, to loll about the house, watching TV or playing computer games, or to hang out with their middle school classmates.
Almost to a person, they told me they wanted to be back at university. The Chinese value education so much more than Americans do. Although a Chinese education is a grueling, almost unbearable process in many ways, my students don't care. They want "to learn a lot of knowledge," as some say somewhat ungrammatically. A university education means a good job and success in life, and above all, respect from your peers and elders.
So my gals and guys work hard. My G2 class spent 45 minutes that afternoon, dutifully answering that hackneyed "what I did during my summer holiday" essay prompt, stopping often to look up words in their electronic dictionaries, and (as I have counseled them) quietly reading aloud what they have written before handing them in.
For my part, I dutifully read every single one of those essays, 70 in all, and handed them back the following class, festively decorated with all my little red correction marks. It's a yeoman's task. It's not glitzy. It won't make me wealthy or famous. But I will do it cheerfully, as I have done all my teaching tasks these past 25 years. Sure, it's part of the job, but I respect my students. Despite their sometimes faltering efforts, most cherish the opportunity to get an education, and many have lofty goals that require a university education. They are busting their buns for their professors and their families, so I need to emulate them.
It's what I do. After a quarter century, it's what I am. I am a teacher. Wo shi laoshi. 我是老师.