There Is Your Classroom...They Wait For You

Anna's words after handing me my textbook. 

Note that this took place roughly 10 minutes after I arrived at the campus for my first day of class.  Also note that this took place after I requested time and time again if I needed to prepare for my first class.  And there I was, standing in front of about 45 students, with about 5 minutes to flip through the text book before the bell rang for class to start.

Luckily, it all worked out.  I asked them to each stand up and tell me their name and where they grew up.  After that, I had them make little name cards to place in front of them on their desk.  And then we read the article and discussed it for the rest of the class time.  The article was on the current trends of racial segregation in America.  Getting them to volunteer was impossible and I essentially had to call on students one by one to give their feelings/ideas on a subject.




I was going to have the students come up one by one and show me on a crudely drawn map of China where they grew up.  It quickly became apparent that they were all from the Jiangsu province, and having a map of China with just one section covered in dots hardly seemed worthy of class time.  I then showed them where I grew up in America, which most of them identified as simply the home of Disney and the Miami Heat.

But yeah, for a lesson that was prepared in about 7 minutes on the spot, it went pretty well.  I plan on discussing ideas for activities that promote student involvement with some of the other teachers that have a better idea of what the hell they're doing.  If I can get them to read, discuss, and listen to American speech patterns and pronunciations...then I've done my job.

And as somewhat of a side note:

Some of them had absolutely wonderful English names.  My top three are as follows:

1.  Parsley
2.  Tree
3.  Eleven

I think "Eleven" might be my favorite, for some reason.