I have six classes of freshman English majors where I teach oral English. In each of these classes there are a little more than forty students that I get to pretend I know what I am doing in front of for an hour and a half once a week. Twice a week I meet with a class of non-English major freshman, for a listening and speaking class. There are fewer of them, 19, but their level is obviously much less than that of my major students.
Teaching is interesting. I don’t think I am very good at it at this point, it’s my first time teaching like this anyway, but I think it is really interesting and it is fun being creative and finding different ways to get students to practice what they know. And I am learning a lot. Maybe next term I will emphasize things like vocabulary more because I feel like I am presenting a handful of words each week and they remember them for the length of one class, then when I do recall stuff later they have no idea what I am talking about. Things like that I still need to work on. But then, vocabulary is not particularly my emphasis anyway.
I also find myself in fast associations with many people, English major students, non major students, other teachers, and just other people in the city that want to be my best friend if only so I can personally teach them all English. And I am not an English tutor. I don’t know how to be a tutor and I don’t have time enough to be a tutor. But then all too frequently I don’t know how to get out of situations like that when I would like to be doing anything but being a free private tutor for one person.
Which brings me to my other problem is that I never feel like I have enough free time or know anyone easy going enough to allow me to study Chinese at all. Outside of restaurants and supermarket situations I have had no opportunity to practice at all, which seems absurd except that on campus everyone wants me to speak English constantly and so this is hardly an immersive condition. It’s frustrating, and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Chinese wasn’t so impossibly hard for me anyway. Honestly from how things look at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t learn anything new to say in the next year. Ok, maybe I can, it is just really hard to ever practice and I’m feeling overwhelmed by it is all.
But I do like teaching. And all the students seem to mostly like me. I try to teach a little about American culture in my classes too. Sometimes I think I know too much about linguistics, like when a student asks about the spelling of something and I get to talking about Old English, German or French and then just stop and have to say, “well, that’s just the way we do it…”. And it is all really fun. In my listening class we have listened to a few songs and I have had them try to figure out what some of the lyrics are. And sometimes things are just baffling, like when a student comes with an English textbook for another class asking her to fill in blanks with “a” or “an” or “the” or “some” and one of them is seriously like “Harry wants to go to __ store”. And I just say, “well, I guess you should put “the” but you really could put “a””, and the student looks at me pleadingly and I know if I say anything more I will just make this more baffling and be making fun of this illogical textbook. Or one of my textbooks that asks students to look up the word ‘brasserie” because it is used in a listening activity, but then of course, it isn’t in anyone’s dictionary and I have to explain it and explain that no Americans actually use this word.
But with all the ridiculousness and all the whatever, I really like it here right now. If nothing else but for the PC goals of showing people of other cultures what Americans are like, I think people are surprised by things I like and do and say because it is not in line with their American stereotype. I guess I could say a lot about stereotypes, but I can save that until another time.
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