Here's a little sign I found not far from my work yesterday. A very important message about "the sequent" that's immediately clear to all of us... right?Yesterday I taught a two hour straight lesson to some of my school kids (only 12 luckily) from 3.10 to 5.10 in the afternoon. Usually it's a 1 hour lesson, and as much as I protested about this, I ended up doing it. The kids are 9 or 10 years old and sitting through a 2 hour lesson with some foreigner speaking English must be extraordinarily painful. I tried my best to fill out the lesson with games and things, but it's a pretty hard thing to do no matter how you approach the lesson. I also don't really think teaching kids is my thing. My personality just isn't really suited to it (You know that, "I can't really be bothered trying to enforce some sort of disciplined class" mentality). When the kids get hysterically excited and yell stuff at the same time, I'm thinking just shut up - give it a break! But then when they are too quiet, bored or just not interested, you think why won't someone talk... Every now and then, perhaps just 5-10 minutes in a lesson, or if you're lucky most of the lesson, you get a lesson where the right balance is struck - a level of interested quietness, but responsive answering of questions or involvement in the activity and you actually see that little light in the kids' eyes when they understand something or work out something for themselves. That's a pretty cool feeling. I like those moments like this when they are listening attentively to your every word, or their trying to talk themselves and concentrating so hard about what to say.
But in my two-hour mammoth lesson yesterday, I didn't get much of that 'good stuff'...
8 comments:
heh
You're a man of many words Foobar
Is that "Foobar" as quoted in Tango & Cash ? I suppose not, as then it would be "Fubar". I don't know you Foo, but that would be really funny. At least funny to me, but then I have a warped sense of humor. Just ask Nancy.
I'm loving the signs. Do they even get that we westerners have and are sharing with all, written confirmation that they are tossers and are really embarassing themselves ?
Why should we "answer for the sequent"? Can't the sequent answer for itself?
Addressing the actual post, I also know what it's like to teach (Japanese) kids for 4 straight lessons - and it wasn't at all pretty. Personally, I felt like an English-speaking child minder / punching bag.
I'm guessing all the professional teachers are now giggling to themselves thinking "now Wurly knows what it's really like."
Try teaching them poker next time.
I've contemplated the endless supply of badly phrased English in China and come to the conclusion that there are literally not enough English speaking people around to check/edit English signs, hence this job falls to the 'best speaker' in any office/shop etc and they probably turn to a crappy computerised translation... hence the shite that comes out...
In other news, as expected my school's trying to get me to teach two more two hour lessons to kids this week beginning tomorrow. I'm in lock-down, fight mode right now - pointing out amongst other things that my contract finishes in 6 weeks and they need to play their cards right...
It seems that these managers never got over the totalitarian born to rule thing.
Welcome to liberal capitalism fellas.
I know I'd hate to be left with the job of translating from Chinese to English....who knows what hilarious crap I'd come up with!
I'm gonna start using "sequent" more often... despite the fact that I still don't know what it means and I don't intend checking with a dictionary.
I'm just gonna throw it out there a bit... "would you like to sequent that, yourself" - maybe I can use it it my next contract negotiations...
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