As a former English teacher and long-time observer of the curious ways Chinese people approach our native tongue, my list of linguistic pet peeves is surprisingly few. Yet there is one term that I can no longer stand: delicious. Ask any Chinese person about his or her favorite food and you’re bound to hear the [...]
Archive for the ‘Teaching ESL’ Category
Foreign culture in the classroom
A few weeks ago, I decided it was time for a change in my English as a Foreign Language classroom. The lessons I’d been teaching had been disjointed one-off topic lessons that piqued the interest of a very small portion of my 825 (give or take) middle-school students. The vocabulary used was scanty, I hardly [...]
It’s a sickness
As an English teacher at a 6,000-strong middle school in the northwest of Hunan province, I come into contact with several hundred students a day. My course load puts me in front of roughly 850 students a week. In a school as cramped as mine, the students and staff are constantly breathing each other’s germs. As such, when I started to get a deep-lung cough and run a mild fever, I should have known it was only a matter of time before the surgical-mask brigade descended on our school.
Tuesday, October 26th, after about a week of classrooms full of hacking, coughing, sniffling teenagers, I walked into my first period to find 40% of my class wearing surgical masks. The next day, the school closed down for a week due to the diagnosis of swine flu in several students and one teacher. That’s right: we got the piggy.
H1N1 has become a pandemic, so much so that it’s now considered to be “the dominant flu strain in the world today,” according to an article at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The article gives a good overview of the implications and complications of swine flu and the panic surrounding it. The US government’s website about the flu provides statistical evidence that backs up the RFE/RL article. The World Health Organization has an FAQ about the pandemic.
Tackling ESL Myths
As a bona fide news junkie, one of my favorite magazines is Foreign Policy. Each dead-tree issue has a section called “Think Again” in which a writer analyzes a series of assertions about a particular subject, say, the Israel/Palestine situation, and offers a slightly contrarian take on what many consider to be conventional wisdom. Let’s [...]
Reaching the Back Row
Entering my second semester of teaching ESL in southern China, I’ve been rejuvenated by a weeklong trip to Hong Kong over winter break and put in high spirits thanks to the early arrival of spring. Life these past few months without heating proved to be nothing short of brutal. Nowadays, rapeseed blooms in the fields [...]
The English Teaching Blues
I know of a man in Kunming who, after teaching English here for a period of about seven years, assumed a managerial position at a friend’s company. The job didn’t go well, as the new manager regularly turned up late, failed to fulfill contractual obligations, and did a poor job managing his staff. Eventually, he [...]
A Modest Proposal
I first became aware of the enormous language gap in China three weeks into my first year, when I taught English at a public high school in northern Jiangsu. One afternoon, feeling slightly homesick, I hopped into a taxi with a simple mission: to go to McDonalds. Being completely unable to speak Chinese at that [...]
University ESL Teaching: What you should be asking about!
Teaching ESL at a university in China is a good gig: low hours, long holidays, weekends and more than enough money to survive on. If you’ve chosen this route you’ll find that most universities (and agents on their behalf) are very happy to offer basic terms, conditions and vague information to hurry you through signing [...]
Crossing The Line
Recall the old expression: teachers are to act in loco parentis. This means, if my high school Latin still serves me, that during school hours the teachers are responsible for assuming the role of parents in the lives of their students. Yet as anyone knows, this doesn’t really work. As teenagers, the last things we [...]
Eager? Or Just Inappropriate?
The scene should be familiar to all who have lived in China for awhile: You’re out at a cafe or bar with a group of friends, having a beer and a few laughs (or is that a few beers and a laugh?). A Chinese man, or woman, approaches your table and asks to speak. He [...]
