Teaching Again And Talking About The Financial Crisis In Chinese

The week that was, was a week of settling back into a routine that required early starts and late nights. The early mornings involved being both woken by an alarm clock by my bedside and re-awoken a short time later by the young masses gathered before me in the classroom. Late nights, as learning Chinese often requires, although is not always given, a candle burnt at both ends.

I spent the early part of the week outlining to one Chinese teacher why the use of Chinese by foreigner teachers is actually constructive rather than destructive. Explaining that the use of Chinese in the classroom by a foreigner helps the students concentrate on the target language taught, is quickly understood and seemingly more piercing in its effect when giving instructions or getting attention, and finally, creates amusement. The frustrating aspect of this little discussion, is the light it actually shines on Chinese teachers' over attentiveness on teaching everything that is in the textbook or requesting, without proper thought, that foreign teachers only speak English in the classroom. When firstly, alot of the content in the books taught here is often not particularly useful, secondly, that the Chinese phrases often used in class are either so inconsequential the children already know them in English or don’t need to know them.

Thirdly, if more advanced English is used together with the focus language it can quickly become a case of new language overload. In this scenario, the children are distracted from the key words and phrases being taught, largely because they have difficulty distinguishing the new words introduced from the random. Ofcourse, as the students get older this is an important skill to develop but I would suggest that acquiring a good basis in a foreign language is initially of most importance, before being subjected to further confusion. Teaching is a balancing act that requires patience, reflection, creativity and the skills of adaptation, as well as, and maybe most importantly, quite an acute appreciation of the mood, not only of individual students but of the whole class. These are skills that are sometimes a little lacking amongst Chinese teachers, though this may well be said of many foreign teachers here too. Humour goes along way towards alleviating boredom, regaining attention and lightening the load, foreign teachers speaking Chinese can often be a very quick way of creating these results, as well as attaining the more formal benefits of understanding and discipline.

The week also required a re-engagement with regular Chinese classes and the attention to detail in the preparation that this entails. My Kou3 Yu3 (mouth language) confidence was significantly boosted by the chatting that went on in class this week, especially my 45-minute monologue on the so-called ‘credit-crunch’ (very useful radio broadcast explanation-click on ‘full episode’). I was, however, assisted by my teacher who fed me some of the topic specific vocabulary that I had yet to learn, such as bankruptcy, risk, credit and so on. This is actually a nice fluid process and makes for a confidence inducing exchange, discussing a reasonably advanced issue while being helped just enough to keep you flowing but little enough for it to still feel like an autonomous act. However, the reviewing system I have implemented in recent months had to take a back seat to the learning of new vocabulary and the identification of Chinese characters in the short articles being translated. Another week and another mild step forward, although not something this week that can be said about most of the world’s economies or simply the world’s economy, depending now on how we are supposed to look at it.