Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Here is a quick round-up of some of the funnier moments in the lessons I've taught over the last few months:
Apples
I was really scraping the barrel (pun intended) for ideas this week, so under the guise of revising foods and teaching my students about English eating customs, I spent a good amount of time playing 'the apple game' with my students. This was like the children's party game where you must roll a six, then dress yourself in a hat, scarf and gloves before using a knife and fork to cut yourself a piece of chocolate. Chocolate is extortionate here so I substituted in apples (still not cheap!), and in the absence of dice I dealt out a pack of cards, with students receiving picture cards running to take their turn trying to cut the apple. This game was really popular, possibly because I'd deliberately chosen the ugliest hat, scarf and gloves combo possible and they enjoyed seeing their classmates looking stupid. Some students did well with the knife and fork, but the majority were absolutely appalling. I had kids wildly smashing the knife at the apple without even securing it with the fork, using the knife upside down, burying the knife in the apple and then just banging the whole apple against the table until it split...
Easter
Honestly, my Easter lessons were a bit of a mess, but they were really good fun. They began with a reenactment of the Easter story, which my students loved. The last supper consisted of a board rubber (bread) and a water bottle (wine), and there were screams of laughter when I explained that "Judas" was the same name as in the Lady Gaga song. Easily their favourite bit was the actual crucifixion of Jesus, where they would enthusiastically and without direction from me, haul the actor of Jesus* onto a chair with his back against the blackboard, pin his arms out and 'hammer' his hands with bits of chalk. After the reenactment, I would tell them about how we celebrate Easter in England, and speed along to a demonstration of an egg-and-spoon (rubber-and-ruler) race. I wanted to do an Easter egg hunt with my classes but buying and hiding enough sweets for a class of 70 kids is no joke, so I made some significant adjustments. One student would be blindfolded at the front of the class whilst the rest of the class hid a sweet somewhere else in the room; then, the whole class would try to guide them to the sweet with instructions shouted in English. Some classes were very boring with their hiding places, just placing them on various desks around the room; some were frankly dangerous, trying to balance them on the ledge outside open third-storey windows or holes in the wall filled with bare wires. One class dug a hole in a pot-plant and buried the sweet in there, another hid it in a full water bottle, others stood on chairs and held the sweet above the head of the blindfolded student as they stumbled past. I intervened to hide the sweet on door ledges and students' heads several times. One time I balanced the sweet on the outside of the classroom door, and as the blindfolded student was opening the door and groping around in the doorway, the vice principal walked past. The student knelt to crawl around, feeling her way on the floor whilst the vice principal just stared at her and then, just as she began to stand up, he ruffled her hair and sped away laughing, leaving the rest of the class in hysterics. The one thing that was endemic to every class I tried this activity with was that they'd use it to try and embarrass couples, potential couples or students with crushes on one another. When some students came to the front to be blindfolded, the whole class would explode, screaming to be allowed to hide the sweet, and then they'd rush it to the desk of a specific boy or girl and sit cackling to themselves for minutes at a time. "That boy is timid as a mouse, because he likes her!" I was told about one student with whom a sweet had been hidden, as the rest of the class cheered and shouted the blindfolded girl towards him. I would've thought it was embarrassing for the students involved, but most of them didn't seem to mind so I just left them all to it (intervening only when male students tried to hide the sweets on their friends' crotches. I figured that one was probably a step too far.)
Wall-E
A cop-out lesson on my part, but it's the only film I've shown all year sooo I think I'm allowed it. One Junior 1 class, on hearing we'd be watching a film next lesson, did prepare notes so they could ask me to let them watch Resident Evil instead - erm, no. I was getting pretty bored of Wall-E by the third lesson of it, even when I was just sitting in the corner reading my book, but at least it was funny watching how much the students laughed at each joke, and listening to them call "E-veeee" and "Wall-E" at each other in their best robot voices whenever there was a quiet bit in the film.
English Quiz**
There were varying levels of success when I tried to do a general knowledge quiz with my Junior 2 and Senior students. Some classes - mostly the Senior classes - were really good, taking it very seriously and diving to look up the answers in textbooks and dictionaries. In other classes, I had to really bully the students into participating, circling round the class and reminding people they'd need paper and a pen for about the fifth time. Easily the weirdest answer I got was to the "why is this swimmer [Michael Phelps] one of the world's most famous Olympians?", when someone seriously suggested it was because his swimsuit was made of shark-skins. I had another student who responded to every location-based question by shouting out "Jiujiang": what is the capital of Madrid? Jiujiang! Where is Justin Beiber from? Jiujiang! Where is the world's tallest mountain? Jiujiang! (I'd edited this last question to bypass the Chinese name/English name difficulty. It was only when I started to correct a class who told me Everest was in China that I realised it's actually in Tibet and so it was actually a potentially controversial question. Oops.) Also during the quiz, I learnt officially the most imaginative (and wrong) spelling of Shakespeare, Shagspiya.
Questions
I've done this lesson with Senior students before, but recently I tried it again with my new smartypants Junior 3 class. Every student had to write down two questions - ideally more open-ended, imaginative questions - and then circulate around the class asking their classmates these questions. The class as a whole was very preoccupied with gay people; honestly about half of the questions I found were things like "are you a gay?" "what would you do if you were a gay?" "what would you do if a same sex was in love with you?" There were also a ton of romantically-themed questions like "what is your ideal boy?" "who is your Mr Right?" and "what would you do if you were a boy/girl for the day?" was very popular as well. What I think you'd call Nokia-related banter was common too: things like, "if [student's name] was CEO of Nokia, would you want to be CEO of Apple?" and "what would you do if you were CEO of Nokia?" I was pretty confused by these, but apparently they're hilarious. One girl tried to hide her paper as I walked by, but not before I'd seen that one of her questions was "what do you think of our new foreign teacher?" - I made a point not to ask her what the answers had been, as I did with most students. At the end of the class, I asked random students to stand and tell the class what their questions had been, and what people had said. One boy stood up and announced that he'd asked everyone if a particular boy in that class was handsome; obviously I asked him what they'd said and he told me, disgustedly, that they'd all said he was. Everyone laughed and I picked another student at random to tell the class his question except, without realising it, I'd somehow picked the one boy who'd been the subject of the handsome question. He jumped to his feet and said, "I want to ask [the name of the kid who asked the question about him], what sort of girls do you like?", very aggressively. The first boy leapt back up, shouted, "I like girls who have time but I haven't found any!" and then sat straight back down. Very weird. I collected in their questions at the end and read through them later, which is how I came across the several questions asking how the students would feel if their form tutor died and my personal favourite, "which of our classmates looks the most like a potato?"
Music
Months ago, being the sneaky sneaky person that I am, I stumbled upon the webpage where British Council Teach Abroad participants share their lessons plans and teaching powerpoints. Somehow I'm able to download these powerpoints without a password or anything, so I now have a respectable store of emergency powerpoints for when I'm stuck for a lesson plan. This last week, I've been using a 'music genres' powerpoint I found as the basis for my Senior lessons. Most of the lesson is revising the names of different genres, brainstorming and teaching new words for describing music and having students tell me, as part of a game, why they like or dislike certain genres. The last activity of the lesson is a debate. I ask the students to pick a singer everyone will know (Lady Gaga, Justin Beiber and Taylor Swift are the most common) and then tell half of the class that they hate this singer, and the other half that they love them. The two teams must give reasons for liking or disliking the singer, and if they successfully negate the other team's argument, then I give them a point. The students are generally really good at this, and really funny too. One team told me Justin Beiber was a bad influence because he had a girlfriend too young; a girl on the opposing team leapt up and demanded, "well don't YOU have a boyfriend at 16?" of me and then told the class that everyone in England and America had a boyfriend or girlfriend at 16 so you couldn't dislike the Beibs for that. Another time, one team said Beiber was good because he gave lots of money to charity; the other team said he didn't do it to be nice, he only did it to show off that he was rich. One team said Taylor Swift was bad because she had too many boyfriends; a boy on the other team said that was good because she was more likely to go out with him.
*it's thanks to this lesson that I now have about five students who are referred to in class solely as Jesus. "Jesus, be quiet!" "Okay, Jesus, do you like classical music and why?" etc.
** all credit to this to Beth and Cat, who made the quiz. I just stole it when we went to visit Chongren.
- comments
Jo Love the expression on the face of the boy about to be groped by the blindfolded seeker! Also who does the blackboard art? Of course I'm v impressed at how resourceful a teacher you have become. it's nice that the vice principal takes such active teaching in his stride. Xxx
Your student in Tong Wen school Some funny moments in the article happened around me.The English classes are full of fun.