Reflection

Teaching is a difficult job. The effort involved in the act of retaining the interest of a classroom’s capacity of 17-year-old kids for a span of time sufficient for effectively conveying information, imparting knowledge and/or improving understanding in a fashion that is meaningful to those kids in absolutely any manifestation whatsoever is monumental in both scope and severity. The effort involved in the act of retaining the interest of and imparting knowledge to a classroom’s capacity of SIXTY-EIGHT 17-year-old Chinese kids with a barely functional comprehension of the English language and its tenets, on the other hand, is enough to send a man spiraling downward into a whirling, all-consuming vortex of frustration, despair and self-loathing until said man is altogether prepared to throw up his hands, shout “I just don’t know!” toward the heavens, and then collapse into a darkened corner of the room muttering incoherently to himself and clutching a bottle of scotch to his chest.

I don’t want the above paragraph to impress upon my reader that I am not enjoying my Pre-service Teaching experience here at Xi’an Middle School, because I do indeed enjoy every minute I spend here on campus. I’ve grown very fond of the children I teach here in China, which makes it all the more maddeningly depressing when a lesson of my design doesn’t work quite like I planned.

Last week, I taught my Senior 2 kids a lesson that worked maybe 35% of the time, while crashing and burning in a fiery maelstrom of unmitigated failure and disappointment the other 65% of the time. The activity I used during the faulty lesson in question is a game I unimaginatively called “The Telephone Game” which requires the students to improvise a telephone conversation that continually cycles through individual pairs of students in the class. I start the game off – telling a student a brief personal anecdote, asking the student a question relating to said anecdote, and then excusing myself from the conversation. The student then selects one of his/her classmates with whom to next share a conversation. He/she relates to the person he/she has chosen a summary of my anecdote, asks him/her a question relating to my anecdote, and then tells him/her a new anecdote dealing with him/herself. I keep a list of the game’s outlined procedures on the wall using the classroom’s projector (as a handy visual-aid just in case any student forgets how to correctly play the game) and listen closely to each pair’s conversation (offering guidance, suggestions and corrections when appropriate).

As I indicated above, some of my Senior 2 classes during the first few days of the week did very well with this lesson. They spoke to one another with confidence and purpose, fulfilling all the activity’s requisites while – it appeared to me, at any rate – thoroughly enjoying themselves. I foolishly thought I had struck gold with this lesson when I saw how successful my first few classes were with it. It wasn’t until I witnessed the thorough boredom, distaste and indifference exhibited toward the activity by the week’s later classes that I realized the inherent flaws in the lesson’s design.

First of all, the week’s latter classes WOULD NOT SHUT UP while the two students whose turn it was to speak were conducting their conversation. I was standing but a scant 3 feet away from the pairs who were speaking on any of the game’s given turns, and I couldn’t make out a single word that was being said because the rest of the class was being so noisy. I tried quieting the noisy students* on many occasions, but to no avail. They continued to converse and laugh amongst themselves as if I had said nothing to them at all.

Also, after the first 8 or 10 students had taken their turns and completed their conversations, any and all consideration for the activity’s guidelines was very quickly and very thoroughly discarded. During their turns, the kids just started regurgitating half a dozen or so words uttered by the preceding student, asking their partner “What do you think of this?”, and then having a seat and ending their turn without even waiting for an answer to their apathetic query. Upon seeing such behavior, I halted the game, reasserted the game’s conventions, and proceeded to see absolutely no change in the students’ performances. Finally, I decided that something was seriously amiss here and it was more than just lazy students.

As my final class last week dealing with this rotten lesson as its primary focus winded down, I reflected upon the poor student performance (not to mention manners!) that I had seen earlier and that I was still seeing at that moment. I began to think that perhaps the design of the activity itself was at least partially to blame for the lesson’s failure. I thought that too few students were actively engaged at any one time. Rather than only requiring one pair of students to speak and improvise at any given moment, I needed to devise a way to involve more of the class at once on a constant basis. In an effort to disprove or reinforce this hypothesis, I posed said hypothesis to my students during the closing moments of class. I apologized for the decidedly lame activity they had just been forced to endure, assured them that I’d have something better for them to do when we next meet, and then asked for any suggestions they may have to offer regarding how I could improve this lesson. Only two students came forward with ideas to offer, but I’m certainly glad they did because the suggestions they had to offer were the exact same ones I had been posing to myself only moments earlier.

That sealed the deal: the lesson wasn’t inclusive enough. It only required the rapt attention of two students at any given time, so of course the rest are going to be bored most of the time and will inevitably busy themselves somehow! I like the idea of using improvisation to teach spoken-language skills, I really do. Improvisation requires the speaker to provide dialogue to a suggested scene without having the time to worry too much about things like grammar, pronunciation and so forth. That is, the speaker has a clear task to complete (creating a conversation with a partner that is appropriate to the established scene) and a restricted amount of time during which to complete it so he/she cannot be worried with grammatical conventions and other things that get in the way of expressing one’s thoughts and feelings. Improvisation forces the speaker to speak reactively – just like during an actual conversation during which a speaker must react to what the other individual says.

I think that the lesson has value, but I need to devise a more practical, inclusive method of implementing it.

*As a sidebar, I’d like to offer this bit of information – I’ve had trouble with noisy students since I arrived here at XMS almost 6 weeks ago. I wasn’t completely sure of the extent of my classroom authority when it came to discipline, so I did little to combat such behavior initially. I asked one of the head-teachers in my office for whatever guidance he could provide concerning how I might curtail unwanted classroom chatter. His advice was as follows: “Tell them to be quiet. They will quiet down for a few minutes. Then, tell them to be quiet again when they are noisy again”. Sagely advice, indeed.