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[Roger]

"We don't need no education/
we don't need no thought control..." (PINK FLOYD: WALL)

New job, new joys. Or worries?
It was a roller-coaster experience, giving trial lessons and being assessed by Chinese English teachers of varying competence and personal charisma...
So, the job was mine, and the terms and conditions looked pretty pretty.
I hit the bed and fell asleep. I dreamt, and the dream turned into a nightmare!

I dreamt of my first day. I entered the Dean's office. She got up, smiled and told me in these exact words: "You walk is talk in English. You is talk to student, student is talk to you in English. Student say English is very well!"

Before I saw myself entering my class, I woke, perspiring, hot, uncomfortable! What had woken me was, perhaps, a vision of myself as a kind of Steppenwolf, you know that schizophrenic character in one of Hermann Hesse's cult novels, a loner who hates the world and its more recent innovations, a misanthropic man whose other identity half is a woman that balances the whole human being's outlook by her feminine and intuitive mind. If you have read that fascinating story you will know there is no such a thing as a healthy balanced yin-yang of Hermann and Hermine - Hermann kills himself, and before he can do that he must kill Hermine as she demands that as a price for her love to him!

I turned on the light, uncorked a bottle of Grao Vasco from Portugal and inserted a CD in my stereo.
The room was soon filled with the rousing sounds from the musical "WALL".

I remembered my old man whose mother tongue is French. I heard it often between him and my mother, but he never spoke it to me.
He spent only a couple of years with us, then he left us behind.
When I went to school, I had to study French, and for reasons I did not understand at the time I was always first in our class in French. I HATED IT! I hated French, and I hated being good at it! What marked me as a better French speaker in my class? It was probably anchored deeply in my subconscience, grounded for eventual resuscitation.

Only many, many years later would I meet a French woman, a real, genuine jeune francaise that fell for me. She had a daughter, and so I learnt to use French in my daily dealings with native French speakers.

But it horrified me in this lonely night to think of my Chinese English charges and their Chinglish.
Chinglish is that ugly *beep* that fuses effortlessly the past with the future into a timeless present tense.
Chinglish is that outlandish lingo that blissfully ignores the imperatives of constructing defining clauses with relative pronouns.
It's that alien language that does not distinguish between He and She, singular and plural, and lots else besides! It's also the tongue that never makes it clear whether 7 plus 7 equals 40 or 14, and you can't really know whether Chinese "sing" when we would "think".
Above all, it's the "language" that Chinese condescendingly use in their clumsy attempts at social or business intercourse with people from the rest of the world.

Now these are but mere symptoms of a disease, and many believe these symptoms would eventually go away if only the Chinese had enough opportunities to practise spoken English!

Nothing could be further from the truth!
The more they practise, the worse it gets. Their poor pronunciation and dysfunctional grammar get reinforced and fossilised. The result is that more and more official English translations, such as product descriptions and manuals, are in perfect Chinglish, understandable to nobody!

I think what gave me that night's bad dream was the realisation that as EFL teacher I was being expected to do an essentially useless chore.
Most Chinese cannot read and understand a simple sentence, no matter how many tens of thousands of words they have "studied". Do a dictation of a story, and see the incredible confusions they commit: A taxi becomes a "test" or a "tax", and if they know how to write "know" they won't recognise a word such as "knew".

We are too much of "therapists", doing remedial work, not enough of "teachers" who do actual teaching, laying foundations on which students could build their own English houses! Our Chinese students learn bit by bit, word by word, memorising, learning by heart and by rote; yet they are seldom prepared for sentences in which the acquired vocabulary is rearranged together with one or two new items. This normally throws them off the track, they want a translation.

And, they do not learn out of curiosity but out of duty to their country. Devoid of personal interest, enthusiasm, they labour and work because this is their perceived destiny. Nobody likes to learn it (just like myself when I was at school studying French!).

The schools control their thoughts, almost their every thought, down to the utterance "I love my English teacher" (and "my home country"). They don't learn to choose what they like. Thus they learn English in spite of themselves.
May this be one of the more convincing reasons that explain their poor intellectual performances?

English conversations, English corners: chitchat, talking and repeating what has been said many times before. One student after another comes up to you to ask "where are you from?" while the next student, though within earshot of the first one, is mentally rehearsing the same question, not listening to the first one asking it right then.

They need intellectual stimulation! Focus on topics less personal, more common, communal perhaps, international; can you talk with them about ethics, love, religion, world history, Japan, how to do business the international way?
Do they read any good novels? Do they do crossword puzzles? Play chess? Do sports?
The answers are: No! No! No! No!

[Susie]

I am learning Chinese.

I wonder what my Chinese teacher thinks of foreigners attempts of learning Chinese!

In fact, I would really love to hear the true confessions and thoughts of my Chinese teacher or any Chinese teacher who teaches Chinese to English-speaking caucasians.

[dractalks]

Rog,

Did you pen this whole expose'? If so what are you wasting your time her for this is tre magnifique! COme on, you don't need this China gig ! Vous parle vous francais? j'parle au petite peu apre solement trois ans, (c'est le typique american) ...desole.

[Chairman Roberto]

Roger--

Take a vacation. Get out. Go to Thailand or Laos or someplace stress relieving before your burst an artery. No joke.

I'm sorry, but your blanket statements simply don't apply to my students. Some of them, yes, but those are the talentless ones who don't care and sleep in my class anyway. But the students who do care consistently amaze me, given the almost complete lack of English in rural Hunan. If you could only spend a few days with my literature and writing classes, just maybe your faith in Chinese students...and humanity to boot..would be restored.

You're an veteran, and I worry that this where I'll end up in a few years..(I'm been in this racket only a paltry three years). If so, it's time for me to find another career. That's not the first time that's occured to me!

Seriously. When Spring Festival rolls around, TAKE A BREATHER.

with respect,
Roberto

[wOZfromOZ]

good stuff Roger

............hitting the nail on the head once again.

Have another bottle of Aussie Shiraz tonight mate and you'll have good dreams guaranteed!

....selective abstraction, arbitary inference, personalisation, .....maybe
Roberto's got a point!! ...but I dont think so.....

keep the realism coming Roger!

wOZfromOZ

[Susie]

Humour is important in human communication and in second/foreign language learning humour is often lacking because people don't understand the jokes.

How about adding humour, I mean, when your students ask, "Where do you come from?" Say, "Hands up, who wants to know where I come from?"

Then, show them your Alien's Employment Permit and joke with them that you come from a place where there are loads of "Aliens" living on earth! Then tell them to get a map, find one of those places and write 100 lines about it!

So when even one student asks a question, the whole group (in a communal-like spirit) gets the opportunity to learn and actively participate in the learning!

OR you could get your students to sing a song (they should sing each line after you) like this one:-

Everywhere I go oh (students echo)
People always ask me (echo)
Who I a-am (echo)
Where do I come from (echo)

And I always tell them (echo)
I'm from Aliens' Ville (or Australia, etc.) (echo)
Lovely, lovely Aliens' Ville (echo)

And I alway charge them (echo)
10 yuan for answers (echo)
Now I'm ri-ich (echo)
Very, very ri-ich (echo)

For some people, humour may be like a bandage on the "reality" of teaching and living in China, one still may have to deal with the annoyances...etc.

[dractalks]

Hey Susie,