I started my career in China by teaching English in a learning center, this is a place where English is taught to students based on their grasp of the language, regardless of their school level. You can have a class comprised of young children and adults mixed together or you can have a class full of toddlers. And each class is as unique from the others, that you have to be very flexible and able to think on your toes. Teaching methods are also quite different here, a teacher is evaluated based on how loud the students read, the number of times they would laugh and the number of activities they do in a class period, the louder the reading, the more laughs and the more activities you do will make you a better teacher if not the best teacher. When teaching in this kind of set-up, it is more convenient to concentrate 75% of your time entertaining and devoting the other 25% in getting to your teaching goal for the day.
After teaching for a few months in a learning center, I decided that it would be much better if I were to teach in a regular school. Teaching in a regular school means, the learning is more structured and your preparations depend on how many grade levels you handle. In this part I thought I got lucky since I got a position as a teacher in a middle school , and I was to teach only one grade level. Teaching in a regular school, a foreign teacher needs to reinforce what the local English teachers teach in the classroom and try to add to it, easy as it may look, a lot of problems arise from the reinforcement of what they learn. Since the students are taught from the books they use, their language, communication and vocabulary is limited to what is in the book. If you try to teach them something related to the topics they have in the book, but is not in the book, it would be like teaching them a whole new thing. A lot of patience and persistence is needed in order to coax the students to participate. During this process, it is common to feel frustrated and perplexed, but we need to realize that there is a lot of pressure placed on a young student's shoulders to succeed and that making a mistake is not looked upon kindly, so their tendency is to stick to what is seen and proven and they are wary of trying out something new. In the classroom, you also experience trying to teach using the middle ground, because in class of about 50 to 60 students, about two or three of the students have had English tutorial lessons, ten or twelve could understand the lesson well and the rest do not understand any of it, even if they could read the texts. If you teach English at its simplest form, those who understand it would be bored and would not be interested in class, but if you teach it to accommodate those who want to learn more, the rest would then be bored and would lose interest. So a teacher must continually shift the lesson to interest both kinds of students while continually trying to introduce related vocabularies and conversations from their books. This would take a lot of skill in classroom management and teaching methodology.
My experience in China is not so different from others who have tried teaching in a foreign country. All you have to know is that in trying something new, one must be ready to change everything they have learned and try to adapt to the challenges that they may face.
Have you experienced the same things as I have? Then maybe we could share some more of our ideas and maybe help others who are interested to experience the same things.
