Week 9 – Goodbyes and Getting Them Engaged.

The start of week 9 saw the end of the Matthews’ time in China. It had been and adventure filled 10 days and easily the biggest and best surprise of my life. As you can see from the picture below – I took their leaving very well…

No time to mope though as we were straight back into another week in the Primary School! This week we were getting the other half of the classes that we had been teaching the week before. I feel that this was really useful for us as we were really able to refine our teaching and test out what work and what didn’t. I also found that there was a massive range in the ability of the classes that we were teaching. It seems that from a very young age, children are streamed into classes 1-5 (1 being the lower ability pupils and 5 being the higher) The difference was very apparent and meant that I had to be prepared to drastically alter the structure of my lesson from class to class, some of which, we had not been able to observe during the previous week.

Furthermore, I found that most classes had one or two pupils who were really ahead of the curve, seemingly because they travel to the like of America or the UK on a regular basis. This is good in a sense – it is fantastic to see pupils who are half my age speaking so fluently in what would be their third language (Mandarin, Cantonese and English). On the other hand, it seems that the rest of the class are all too aware of the pupils’ proficiency and often let them answer all of the questions while they sit quietly by the side; as I have mentioned in previous posts – this makes differentiation difficult at times, you don’t want to discourage the pupil who is doing so well but at the same time – you want everyone to participate.

For me, I tried to deal with this by limiting pupils to one answer per topic when doing a “whole class activity”, most of my other activities were discussion based with a partner – this allowed me to circulate and address pupils who were having issues.

Meanwhile back in halls - Home-made mosquito net

I feel that a big problem in schools here is getting pupils actively engaged in the class. Typically, they are in there seats, in their rows and they work quietly from the start of class until the end. I can just imagine some teachers reading this and thinking “And?! That’s great!” and they would be right in a sense. However, education is meant to be interactive and prepare pupils for the world and many of them struggled with discussion exercises – that is not great. Therefore, during all of my classes, at some point the pupils were up and active – singing, dancing or reciting some crazy tongue twister – having fun and learning English.

I have learnt a lot from the Primary school and I am so excited to move to the Middle School and back to my usual age group.

Cheers guys,

Adam