After three days of teaching, I have met about four hundred students in three different grades. I am exhausted, and it didn’t help that these were three of the smoggiest days I’ve ever seen in Beijing, so bad that the government was advising people to not go outside. I had no time for speaking in any of the classes. The three main activities were a TPR (Total Physical Response) activity, a detailed introduction of myself (the students filled in the chart they made with my personal information), and some simple pronunciation practice.

The best thing about all of the classes was that students laughed. I would say that’s a pretty good sign that they understood me. There were only two classes, from the 2nd year of junior high school, that seemed a bit subdued. They were not bad at all, just less active than the other classes. Students responded well to my TPR requests, with less difficulty than I anticipated. They listened carefully (they did not tune out), though quite a few students spent time checking with their classmates to see if they were doing the same thing. In most classes, with most students, that checking decreased as the class went on, as they gained confidence in their physical responses to my instructions.

When we got to the drawing part, there were many variations among students. For example, there were various judgments as to what “big” and “small” mean. For example, some students drew “a small triangle” so small that I couldn’t distinguish it from a dot. When I asked students to draw “a short line”, quite a few drew a line all the way across the paper. When I asked them to write the word “name” in the top box of the chart (which they drew according to my instructions), there were a few students in every class who wrote “n” in the top box, “a” in the box under that, “m” in the next box, and “e” in the next box.

In the four high school classes, their written answers during the Q&A activity were also quite varied, suggesting they do not always just follow their classmates. For example, some wrote “Joe has four sisters”, some wrote “Joe has three sisters”. (I have three sisters living in my hometown, but one other living in another state, so the total is four.) These activities were a great way of getting information about students’ ability. They can understand more than I expected, and now they are starting to get used to listening to my voice, which will make future activities easier to set up.

Next week I’ll do some listening, probably in the form of dictation, so that I have some objective numbers to use for comparisons at the end of semester. Mostly, however, I will do speaking, probably using

pair practice handouts or a kind of “speaking bingo” game. I’ll try to post more this weekend if I have time, otherwise I’ll report on what happens next week in our second class.