Trial by Fire

Yesterday was my first foray infront of a class. Well, by class, I mean 3 students. Let me explain...

We went to the Maryknoll Technical College in Hong Kong to teach our first lesson plans. With class sizes about 15-20, this was supposed to be a simulation of what we'd be doing all year. Since the MTC is in Hong Kong, the students have already been permiated with English yet don't often get to speak it. They said that the student's English would be about equivelant to our Spanish by senior year of high school (or whatever language one studied at that level).

So, with the thought in mind that we'd have two 45 minute blocks to teach in, we broke it up into pairs. I was with Ryan, my good friend whom I'll be at Zhongshan with this year. My lesson plan, of course, scheduled 2 small group activities which would each take 5-10 minutes (coming up with things to do in HK and then questions that a tourist might ask them on the street) and then a 20 minute presentation section where groups played the two different roles (tourist and local guide) infront of the whole class. With only 3 students, you really can't switch up "groups" all that well and they can't really "present" to the "whole class" for "20 minutes." Yeah, trial by fire...

In lieu of actual presentations, I had them create a schedule on the blackboard and then rotated the three students around playing the different roles. I think it went really well, in light of the dramatic lack of students.

Also, Ryan's activity had them write responses to different questions and then we'd discuss them. The final of 10 questions was: "describe Hong Kong in ONE word." One of the students said, "Noisy." Another wrote, "Busy." The third and brightest of the group wrote, "Before 1997: bright. After 1997: dim." This is all in reference to the '97 handover of HK from British control to the Chinese. BOLD!

There is a lot to each of these studnets and I look forward to getting close enough with my students to have frank converstations about these topics. As for yesterday, I dropped my jaw and decided to change the subject for safety's sake...

more to come soon as I depart tomorrow morning for Zhongshan. Excited. Nervous. CHINA! peace. paul.