In Which I Receive Feedback
With my first lessons behind me, I am starting to receive some feedback on my nascent teaching ability. It seems I might be not entirely hopeless.
On Wednesday, Cathy sat in on two of my lessons. The school provides teachers official notebooks for when we sit on on other teacher’s classes, and Cathy had hers out and was scribbling furiously. When I walked by as I circulated the classroom, I could see that she had filled at least two or three large sheets of paper with writing. Part of me was not shocked, as Cathy tends to unleash words in great torrents. Part of me, though, was deeply concerned. What was I doing that was so wrong she needed to write so much?
As it turned out, nothing. When the lesson was done, Cathy complimented me for my classroom management skills, informed me that I was not the worst English teacher in the department, and left.
Considering that I’m the least experienced English teacher at the school and likely the only teacher at the school who did not go to a normal university—a university dedicated to teaching teachers, in non-China terms—I’m actually fairly pleased with that assessment.
Then today, while waiting for the bus to take me from my school to downtown Kaihua, I ran into another teacher at the school, a history teacher. We’d met before at a dinner, when the young faculty of the school congregated to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival, but this was the first time we’d had any kind of conversation, mostly because my Chinese is not strong enough to have any kind of conversation and his English is very rusty. We talked a little bit about where he was from, what he was doing in Kaihua, and what portions of American history are taught in Chinese history classes. He also mentioned—unprompted!—that apparently the students like my class.
In some ways, this comes as a tremendous relief to me. My first class was deliberately designed to be less interactive and less fun than subsequent classes will be. Given that I talked for more than three-quarters of the class in English at a level slightly higher than theirs and given that I started the class with a series of rules, I was a little bit concerned that the students might not have actually enjoyed the lesson.
The fact that the early feedback about my lessons has been positive is an encouraging sign. It tells me that the basic principles on which I decided to come to China in the first place were, more or less, sound. But at the same time, I have no intention of relaxing now. For starters, I’m not sure how much the students enjoyed the content of my class as they enjoyed being able to stare at a tall white American for forty minutes. Plus, as of this moment, I’ve only taught ten forty-minute lessons over two days. I have almost an entire school year left—in short, lots of time to figure out how to become a better teacher.
It’s time to start learning.
