Job Discussion Forums

[Burl Ives]

In the spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation I sometimes ask the students to write a letter to me. I require it to include one suggestion for what we should do in the class. The sentence stating the suggestion becomes the topic sentence and supporting details are required. Even the dummies produce good writing on those days, I guess because they all know what the teacher is supposed to do. They seem to really like, or perhaps just expect, the teacher to set a composition topic--"something interest and fashion"--then grade every paper, and follow it up by singling out one student for the public dissection of her work. As if.

Last week I walked out on that one damn class. The week before they'd frustrated the lesson plan to the extent that nothing could happen, so I'd pulled the "write me a letter" thing and that'd killed time until the bell rang. Last week they weren't having anything of anything, and I gave up. And every time I say that I feel like I have to write ten paragraphs justifying it--which I probably do--but I ain't gonna. They--young, strong, moderately attractive and reasonably capable at English--had long settled on the idea of classroom as waiting room. Three years of sitting in a waiting room! And I was the garbled public address system. If someone with a trolley came through selling sunflower seeds, the image would have been complete. I left them to it.

"You have to stay," someone said.

To my discredit I used a bad word. I hereby bowdlerise.

"No, I don't," I said.

Elvis left the building about thirty minutes before the end of the second period. Elvis SMS'd his dean on the other campus. His dean was busy, but got back to him later that evening, after Elvis had returned as scheduled to that same room, after he had there completed with another class of students the original lesson plan.

Over the next few days Elvis was a little confused. Trying to recreate in his mind what had happened, he found only a blur. Every other class worked, his mind processed. What Beckett dimension had he slipped into that fateful day? He worked out some of it in a written report to his dean. That class, he decided, was populated by not incapable youngsters who weren't rude or maladjusted, but they did fail the college entrance exam for a reason, and they do suffer their parents money. His feeling was they hadn't practiced in a long time the discipline required of any rudimentarily functional university student. Whether that made a difference to the dean or not Elvis will never know because while the dean is something of a theorist on matters educational, he is also a manager and the dummy campus rakes in the dough.

The dean will sit in on that class tomorrow.

I think it's probably a good thing. Everyone I've spoken to has said, dumb down the content. I don't want to. I really don't want to. It makes me complicit in the students' choice to wait out these years. With the dean sitting at the back of the class--and likely having warned the homeroom teacher--the kids will be on their best behaviour. I can give a regular, thought-out, somewhat ambitious lesson, and my fledgling hostesses and housewives and my mortgaged, baijiu-swilling tiny business making merchants in waiting will all demonstrate that they knew all along what they should have been doing.

Elvis will have a field day.

[johnchina]

Tried the letter idea before. I think it's a great idea, but sometimes the answers are ... well ... judge for yourselves ...

1. We want to practise our speaking, without actually speaking.
2. The teacher should tell us how to speak English without us speaking English.
3. If the teacher just speaks to us, we will learn how to speak.
4. The teacher should encourage us to speak, but not me because I don't want to speak.
5. If we read a text it will demonstrate how to speak, so we should read rather than speak.
6. I want to go abroad, but I don't want to speak to foreigners.
7. I don't want to speak English to foreigners. I want to be an interpreter for Chinese businesspeople going abroad. (I kid you not! I had that three times last week!)

Burl Ives - At least they can now use a bad word in context, if they were listening carefully, which they probably weren't ...

[vikdk]

[Burl Ives]

Because Elvis is that way inclined he strode early into class today. Elvis was feeling someone's oats and wore a broad yellow grin. He scanned the room with a sly eye. The monitor noticed.

"You know what's happening today?" Elvis asked.

"It will be better. You have a good mood," she answered.

"Someone will join us," Elvis confided. "An important man, and someone from here."

The monitor whipped out her mobile.

"Don't tell them!" Elvis said.

"It's my duty," said the monitor. It was five minutes before the bell and less than half the class were present. Elvis just kept on grinning.

The Dean turned up on the bell and took a seat at the back of the class. The room seemed unusually full, but he had beaten a handful of kids through the door by a good few minutes. Elvis fired up the ole huckster charm machine.

"How was your TEM4?" he addressed the class.

"Just so-so," they said.

"Everyone had a happy time?" he asked.

"Don't mention it," they said from the back row.

And then we got down to it--a class on describing characters, then using them to generate a story. Questions were posed to the class as a whole. Last week that would have been wind that had died in Elvis's throat for all the notice his handsome, rakishly debonair self would have been paid. This week's answers sailed right back at him. The necessary model of character description was built in sweet harmony of teacher and student, focus and chorus. And then it was over to them. Writin' time.

The wheels started wobbling late in the second period, but that's when they're supposed to. Try teaching character-driven story development for the first time in a country known least in the world for the cultural value it places on the individual. But we made it to the end with stories written and presented. Class over, done deal.

"Who is that man?" one student had asked.

The dean was sitting behind her and I was walking around patrolling English language use during group story meetings.

"Tell ya later," I said.

When the fall comes, it's going to be from higher by one pedestal.