Job Discussion Forums

[KarenB]

WEll, good news for my friend (mentioned above) -- we finally managed to convince her headmaster that it was really a good idea to reduce the number of classes she has, so he reduced them from 26 to 16, and she now meets with them once a week.

7969, I really like your idea of having the students do their own assessments. That would work great when you've got tons of students.

[andyscott84]

I've been teaching in the same small town for a while now. I was also a bit confused of exactly what they wanted from me. Teaching each class only once a week didn't seem to accomplish much. I think that due to my over-inflated ego it was a few months before I learn why.

We teachers of small towns are only there to provide conversational English to the students. I've never been told to use any textbooks, but have been required to at least use the same topics. We are there as an aide to the Chinese teachers who are resposible for all things grammatical. Whilst it can be tedious retelling the same lesson plan over a week, you have to try and spice up each lesson. Try to take each topic and research it to find information that the students would never learn in school. For example you can take the topic of 'Media and Television' and talk about the powerful effects of advertising and propaganda. Keep the information the same but teach it in a different way in each class. But, that's only to make it more interesting for yourself.

As for life in small towns, I've found it to be quite rewarding. I am with two other english teachers here. But I spend most of my time with local Chinese and over a long period of booze-ups have managed to discover a lot about the culture without having to travel. Plus you can learn Chinese much more easily in small towns, because most of the people cannot speak any English. Though I'd say that the novelty of small time life is starting to wear off after nearly two nears here.