Teaching and learning

As this blog often looks much more like a travelogue than a reflection of living in China, I thought I ought to write a bit about my actual “job”. Now, I put it in quotations because, honestly, it doesn’t really feel like a job. Almost all of the time, I thoroughly enjoy my time in class, and as I taught here last year, am able to recycle many lesson plans, so that my out of class work is minimal. This year I am teaching a whopping twelve hours of class per week. While that is the normal course load for a professor in the U.S., I don’t have to maintain office hours or a rigorous research project like a real professor. Now, don’t worry, I never refer to myself as a professor, save a few ironic boasts. My twelve hours consist of four sections of “Selected Readings of English Publications” and one section of the default oral English class that meets twice a week. The oral English students are juniors who study what is best translated as secretarial studies, and thus have English on par with some of the freshman or sophomore students. I don’t have nearly as stimulating discussions or activities as those I’ll discuss below, but they are good, kind students and I have fun joking around with them. A few assignments have allowed them to open up a bit emotionally, which is marginally enlightening and a bit touching.

I teach the publications class to senior Business English and English Education students, and they have been a joy to teach. The only negative in teaching them is that in the spring they do an internship, so this is their last semester of classes, which makes for some shotty attendance. Yet, the students that come to class generally have very good English and thus can understand almost all I say at normal speed. They also show much broader ranges of openness to new ideas and concepts, as well as a little more diversified life experiences. In my opinion, this openness to new concepts and ability to understand them is much more what a liberal arts education ought to be. In contrast, even subjects like foreign languages and the social sciences here reflect a more technical training. I have been pretty surprised and impressed with the interests of my students. Two students, for example are currently reading Wide Sargasso Sea and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in English.

In a rare spurt of idealism, my goal for the publications class was to develop the students’ ability to summarize and analyze a newspaper or magazine article using critical and creative thinking. If you’ve read many entries in this blog, you’ll know that (in my opinion) the Chinese educational system and mentality in general, is bereft of critical and creative thinking. Aside from a few of the top national universities, schools here (from kindergarten to cap and gown) neglect these two related skills, which for me were what I most enjoyed in college. I still remember one day in Spanish literature class with a superb professor when most of us had analyzed a pretty polemic and graphic passage in the most obvious way. He got up, stepped back, told us to clean out our brains, and look at it anew. Now, I certainly don’t think I’ll be able to have this impact on my students. But, I am hoping, by providing some important examples, to at least make a few students think differently. I think it’s pretty darn important in a country where the media is heavily controlled, books are censored, the Internet is monitored and controlled with the best Internet surveillance program in the world, and people who speak their mind often aren’t heard from again. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I am doing anything really grand or that could even pale in comparison to the work of the few Chinese dissidents. But, I think that encouraging students to not take an article at its word is the kind of cultural exchange I am paid to provide.

One of the more interesting things about teaching most of the senior students in the English department is to really see the different personalities that different classes take on. My sister Jane had told me this was certain to happen, and teaching four different classes of similar students has really shown me this. Being seniors, they have had three years for their class personalities to develop, and also can communicate much better with me than my freshmen and sophomore students last year. My two Business English classes are much more talkative and responsive than the English education students. One class, which has the most boys, is a lot of fun and for the most part gives me the least trouble in following directions. I think that having more boys is actually one of the big reasons for this. Although their role in China is quickly changing (as it ought to) women here are still often held to a very conservative, patriarchal standard. Until recently, when the Communist Party criminalized the binding of feet and promoted women’s role for both economic and egalitarian reasons, women in China were expected to be obedient, passive, servile, and delicate. Bring that attitude to my class where they’re expected to discuss and doubt articles in a foreign language, and class can be quite quiet. So having some assertive boys makes class much more enjoyable. One of my English Education classes, to be frank, sucks in comparison to the others. Sucks may be a crass word, but they often suck my energy and patience away by refusing to ask questions, answer questions, or suffer a little embarrassment by guessing the answer. I can understand the freshmen being very worried about the Asian tragedy of “losing face” by being wrong amongst their new classmates. But after three years of tracked classes and living next door to each other, I doubt many surprises will emerge, so it’s frustrating that the won’t answer any questions.

I do my best to select articles that balance what I think is beneficial for them to read and their preferences, which I solicited during the first class. One thing I noticed when asking for topics is the sharp divergence between the guys’ and girls’ interests. Most guys were looking to read about computer games or the NBA, while I had an overwhelming preference by the girls for articles about fashion, movies, or American-Chinese cultural differences. Of course, all I want to read about is politics and economics, so I have to show some restraint. Recently they read an article about the Nobel Prize and the military, and the discussion questions were in the general military/war/peace/personal sacrifice field. One student, who is normally pretty quiet and seems much more concerned about her bracelets and make-up made an interesting, if not somewhat obvious statement. She explained to me (I paraphrase) “that the government’s opinion about political subjects is the only one that can exist. If you disagree with it, you will just go to jail. So the only real option is to just say what the government says”. Many of you, like me, might be pretty eager to criticize this apparently lazy and defeatist-esque attitude. But I know that I can’t fully understand the risk vs. reward analysis that past and recent events have formed in my students’ minds. It’s comments like these, and the thinking they make my brain do that make teaching here very enjoyable.
(included are pics of two of my senior classes)