I don't know how this first year passed by so quickly. It seems like such a short time ago that I was delightedly leaving my Chinese host family to arrive at my new apartment in an unfamiliar city. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and St. Patrick's Day all passed and getting ready to start again all over with crazy Chinese characteristics, I can't imagine how they will look this year.
Aside from the summer language program there were a few very interesting events which I was lucky to take part in over this summer holiday. In particular, I want to discuss my experience at this year's Summer Project.
Each summer, all first year Peace Corps volunteers participate in a two week teacher training project in one of several cities in their province. In Sichuan, where I am located, volunteers worked in four different cities-Leshan, Chengdu, Neijiang and Dazhou. I was in Dazhou with five other volunteers including Katie D. and several other volunteer friends of mine.
As coordinator of the project I was charged with working out the logistics for the volunteers joining me at the teaching site. My goals included working out the living arrangements and some other technical details, but also assessing the needs of our students. After meeting with the faculty in Dazhou, I discovered that we had our hands full- over 300 rural teachers were expecting us, each hoping that they might improve their English as well as learn western teaching methods.
We were quite excited, mostly because few of us had had the opportunity to teach teachers from rural areas, it being forbidden in China during the regular school year. And the opportunity to talk to teachers from smaller rural schools has a great appeal to many of us volunteers.
The opportunity was surely going to be a rich experience. After we arrived we had a brief opening ceremony, where the school officials greeted all the project's participants. The president of the school, the mayor, the foreign affairs department and me rather awkwardly in the corner, all got the opportunity to address the rural teachers. As usual everything looked very formal for the opening and all the speakers took their time talking about how great the program would be. As it got to my turn I spoke briefly about how excited we were to meet the new teachers and how I hoped the teachers would be comfortable talking to us, as we knew some of them were rather shy. Then I introduced all the others in our group- Katie D., Warren, Joel, Aaron and Tamarae, all of whom had very interesting backgrounds.
Though we had not all come with an education degree, we each had plenty of experiences teaching. Katie and Aaron probably had the most teaching experience of all of us; Katie having a degree in education from Florida State and years of English teaching experience, and Aaron with a Masters from the same university but in Literature. The rest of us had various interests and degrees, Joel in politics, Warren in grassroots activism as well as Japanese, and Tamarae in public policy. A random mishmash, yes, but most Peace Corps volunteers come from all walks of life, as they should.
Our first week went great. Each of us had about fifty to sixty students and a decent classroom. The classes included, thankfully, an air-conditioner and also computers with a projector. Not something you would expect to find in a smaller Chinese city but we were fortunate enough to have the resources we needed to teach large groups of students. Our topics were geared toward teachers who had been teaching students around high school age or younger, and consisted mostly of language learning activities, games, teaching methods, learning topics, rules for the classroom, methods for getting students involved and common mistakes in English. Not all of the teachers were enthused with our teaching ideas, but the reasoning was understandable. As it turned out some of the teachers had been told it was mandatory to go, even though they might not have any English ability. Also, some of them seemed to think we would be teaching them how to speak English, which for a two week program is virtually impossible. Our main goal, of course, was to help them with teaching English, as they were teachers already. Luckily there were also may teachers at the program who were there of their own free will and who were very happy to learn from us. We tended to focus on helping those who wanted to learn, and giving them as much helpful teaching tips as we could.
Another difficulty we encountered, and not for the first time, was the rigid education methods in China. Not a few teachers confronted us with how they were going to use our methods in a high school classroom that stressed methodical learning styles. For those of you who are teachers and are reading this, you might feel mixtures of shock and incredulity at the system of education I am going to describe to you. I should perhaps start by emphasizing that one thing is done very well here, and that is keeping things the same. If you were to walk into a Chinese classroom now or one hundred years ago the only thing you might find different would be the dress code. And by that I mean what I have mentioned in my previous blog posts, that Chinese students are trained strictly for test taking. Nothing else. If you have an idea that strays from what the mainstream intellectuals deem helpful in learning, you are likely to be thought of us as unrealistic and/or a bad teacher in China. This has several harmful effects- 1. Students don't learn how to enjoy learning, many cannot fathom why learning would be a "fun" or an "enjoyable" activity. 2. If you are seen reading as a teacher, you might be looked upon as being "overly ambitious," because, as we all know, reading is only done for improving one's status in life (cough cough). and 3. No teacher has even the slightest interest in doing anything but reading out of the textbook in the classroom, which is deemed by most teachers and students infallible. That's not fair, sometimes the teacher sings.
But anyway, I could say more but I won't because...well...you can probably guess. But that was a small frustration in our classroom for several of our student teacher, as it should be. The only response we could give, however, is that trying new methods once in a while certainly would not hurt.
 |
| Basketball Tournament |
Many of them listened, some didn't, and that was fine. In the end the program was a considerable success. Many of the teachers left with a library of lesson plans, PowerPoint presentations, activity ideas, songs and much more. In addition, we had the opportunity to join in plenty of outside the classroom activities as well. We had ping pong and basketball tournament, banquets, a BBQ and even a trip to a local water park (definitely not common).
The program ended as it began, with a large banquet, which the Chinese love. They had many types of food and there was plenty of gan bei'ing (chinese toasting with beer or liquor), and one last chance to say goodbye to all our student teachers.
 |
| My class along with the other volunteers in the front row- from left, Katie D., me, Aaron, Warren, Joel, Tamarae |
A great time, and afterwards Katie and I left for our language program in Lijiang, which I mentioned in my last post. Afterwards, I was able to attend the swearing in ceremony for the new Peace Corps volunteers, which happened to coincide with the visit of two very influential people. The first, Vice President Joe Biden, gave a speech at Sichuan University to Chinese students, some high level Chinese officials and the new Peace Corps volunteers. Afterwards, on the day of the new volunteer swear-in, the new US ambassador to China, Gary Locke, was also in attendance. I was somehow able to squeeze my way into both, and had the privilege of shaking both their hands, which was awesome.
 |
| Vice President Joe Biden gives a speech at Sichuan University |
Unfortunately I did not get the chance to tell Mr. Biden that, like him, I had family from Scranton. But maybe someday I'll get the chance.
