Winter has arrived in Yunnan. For
my last weeks in Dazhai, I spent my nights bundled up under several sweaters
and my (admittedly thin) coat when I wasn’t in my room warmed by my small
heater purchased on Taobao (like eBay for China, but better). Yet even during
Yunnan’s harshest weeks of winter, during the day when the sun is out and
shining there is little need for more than a light sweater, and even that can
seem overkill during a game of basketball or a particularly heated round of
ping pong. With winter has come several developments and realizations.
Dazhai Middle School ended the semester
with a week of testing proceeded by two weeks of preparing to test. My students
got more and more used to having a foreign teacher, leading some to feel more
comfortable talking with me and others to feel more comfortable talking during
my class. I completed a glasses project at the school, beginning with a massive
effort to test all nine hundred students’ eyesight and ending with the
distribution of free glasses to two hundred excited and somewhat self-conscious
students. Construction on the new student dorm and bathroom at Dazhai neared
completion, with the start of the new semester named as the perspective end
date. The six month mark of my time in China came and went without much commotion.
Ida’s and my spring festival travel began with a six-hour, four part journey
from Gengga to Lincang (bus to Xiqian, mianbaoche to Fengqing, bus to Yunxian,
bus to Lincang), where I picked up my passport and new visa, followed by a
nine-hour bus odyssey to Kunming. Tomorrow we will fly to Taiwan for the start
of our real spring festival travel.
Before we leave for six weeks of
travel, I want to take the opportunity to reflect on the past semester, its
successes and failures, and the hopes I have for the future.
Around half way through the
semester, I began doing project-based learning (PBL) in my classroom. Whereas
before I had stuck closely to the textbook and the material my students’ other
English teachers were teaching, with PBL I introduced new material (some of it
still from the textbook) which I taught through a central project requiring
teamwork and creativity. The project that I did with my kids was A Day in the Life of a Dazhai Middle School
Student. I taught the students English that they could use to describe
their school and their daily lives, which they would then use within a small
group to write a booklet about their lives at the middle school. As an
incentive, I told the students that the creators of the best booklets in each
class would be able to go with me to the nearby elementary school to introduce
middle school life to 5th and 6th graders and thereby
help prepare them for middle school life. Originally I planned to meet with
each group or a representative of each group three times during the project for
each of three units to monitor progress and improve my relationships with
students. I also planned to give three tests to the students, two unit tests
and one final test.
Right off the bat I faced a number
of challenges. I faced the fundamental challenges that presented their fearsome
faces most every class no matter the content: lack of student motivation or
interest; lack of self-confidence, instilling the internal mantra of “I can’t (不会)” in
many students; massive, sixty-student classes that allowed for minimal individual
or even group attention. Chinese students also have very little experience in
teamwork, so introducing a team-based project required an intense amount of
planning, from deciding group members to assigning seating to choosing group
names to describing the basics of how students should work together in a group.
Other problems presented themselves
along the way. In two of my classes, time given for group work quickly
degenerated into chaos, with perhaps half of the students working with the rest
acting as though it were recess. A lack of resources quickly showed itself with
the turning in of the first page of their booklet, almost all of which had
haphazard pencil drawings instead of the neat color drawings that were
expected; only a very few students had access to markers or colored pencils. My
own very limited time also became painfully obvious as I tried to meet with
students for the first unit. While this combined with Thanksgiving and a visa
trip to Hong Kong to make for an incredibly busy two weeks, I realized that
even with full weeks and groups made up of four to five students, I would not
have enough time to meet with every group. 360 students split into groups of
four or five made about 85 groups, which were impossible to meet with in the
miniscule amount of free time given to middle school students (they have two
hours for lunch and rest in the afternoon and an hour and a half for dinner in
the evening – every other minute of their day is given to classes or study
hall). Finally, time constraints again challenged me during the aforementioned
two weeks of test-prep. I had counted on being able to teach until the week of
testing, but instead found my classes taken away in order to give students
practice tests, taking away my last four classes with my students along with
the vital last steps of the project, including finishing their booklets and the
final test.
In the end, I was able to salvage
booklets of varying quality from four of my six classes, but had no time to
give them grades or go to the elementary school with them (I plan to revisit
the plan next semester). I was able to find time to test one class, which they
did surprisingly well on considering time constraints. I saw impressive group
work in a few of my classes along with several truly creative and well-written final
booklets. After I started providing markers for the students to use, most
groups turned in bright and colorful booklet pages. Many students were well-motivated
by the project’s close connection to their lives. Some students even went so
far as to retain the knowledge.
However, in two classes I had to
abandon the project altogether. After 184 and 185 bans repeatedly descended into chaos during group time, I suspended
the project and taught the material through tighter and stricter lessons with
little to no time during which students could go wild. They still found ways,
of course, yet slowly but surely I reasserted control over the classroom. I was
never able to meet with all the groups. I gave two tests, but had not scheduled
time to go over them with the students, rendering them much less useful than
they could have been. We never made it to the elementary school (I still plan
to do this next semester). Several students were wholly unmotivated by the
project and continued to disrupt class whenever possible. In several groups,
one or two students took control and did the project themselves with little or
no help from the rest of their group members.
Even with these numerous failures,
I consider the project an overall success. I have learned dozens of valuable
lessons for next semester, when I plan to start another project. With the help
of this experience, the support of local teachers and my program manager, and
extensive planning, I believe that I can create a really successful project
with my students.
Outside of the classroom, I was
happy to complete a glasses project at the middle school. With the help of Education in Sight, my co-fellows, and
three eye doctors from nearby Yunxian, I was able to provide free glasses to
two hundred students. It was incredibly challenging at moments, which made it
all the more satisfying to see my students wearing their glasses during the
last weeks of school.
Implementing
the project first required applying to Education
in Sight after discussing the idea with co-fellows and the school
administration. Simple and straight-forward. After being informed that I had
been accepted as a Sight Leader for the program, which would provide funding
and support for getting glasses for my students, I had to test the eyesight of
all 900 students in my school. We had to identify which students likely needed
glasses, who would then be tested by the local eye doctors when they came to
the school. Since I would not be able to test all the students myself, I needed
the help of the banzhuren (home room teachers). A co-fellow helped me describe
what help I needed during a meeting. Unfortunately, it was said at the tail end
of a meeting while about half of the teachers were playing games on their cell
phones, so the message was only half listened to. I had to go speak to teachers
individually and attend a banzhuren meeting later in the week before I felt
assured that all the banzhuren understood what I needed.
Collecting
the information about which students needed glasses from the banzhuren was
another task. Some teachers gave the information to my co-fellow rather than me
(an issue in communication), while others didn’t give them to anyone. I had to
seek out every banzhuren over the course of a couple days to collect all the
necessary information. Still I found myself lacking the eyesight information
for two classes. The students informed me that they had been tested, but that
they had already given their information to the eye doctors. I was very
confused for a day or two until I found out that another teacher, one of the
main school administrators, had brought in a friend or relative who was an eye
doctor in Yunxian to give them eye tests and sell the students glasses. It
became a rather awkward situation.
While we shared a desire to improve
the lives of our students by improving their sight, the school administrator also
wanted to provide customers for his friend. Since he was an important person in
the school, I could not (and did not want to) simply say that he couldn’t do
it. Instead, I had to haltingly discuss the issue with him and the principal (haltingly
because of their difficult accents and dialect-filled speech) and convince them
that free glasses through an unknown was better than costly glasses through a
friend. I also offered to put his friend in touch with Education in Sight so that he could work with them in the future to
provide glasses to students throughout the region. It was enough.
The eye doctors game a week later
and tested about three hundred students throughout one day of classes. We
stopped briefly for lunch and dinner, but other than that worked more or less
throughout the day. My co-fellow and I
went from class to class to ask teachers if we could borrow their students for
a while to have their eyesight tested. I took pictures of students being tested
and trying out glasses frames and strengths. Seeing them point out places and
objects on the mountains surrounding Dazhai, seemingly seeing them clearly for
the first time, made the exhausting day worth it.
Two weeks later, I bused to Yunxian
to pick up the glasses, and a couple days later my co-fellows and I handed two
hundred students their new glasses. Many were excited. Most were self-conscious
about how they looked. They all were able to see the board clearly no matter
where they were sitting. It will still require more work. I plan to meet with
banzhuren next semester to discuss how best to make the students wear their
glasses. I personally told students that they had to wear them while in my
class. I also plan to arrange a meeting of the students to discuss glasses care
and how it is important that they wear them in order to preserve their
eyesight. About sixty percent of the students are wearing their glasses now. I
plan to bring that number up to one hundred percent next semester.
Now we are on vacation. School is
over for six weeks, but it is never far from the mind. Stories of students and
our work are brought up often as we introduce ourselves at the hostel in
Kunming. People are surprised and interested. It is hard to explain how
challenging the work is though. It is difficult to say how rewarding it is for
us and yet how incredibly frustrating it is for us. We rely on stories and anecdotes.
The next semester is six weeks
away, yet it is hard not to plan on how to create a better project, a better
classroom, a better teacher. Both Ida and I have planned out how we will begin
the semester, but there is the constant feeling that we could do more, do
better.
We work to improve our Chinese in
our spare time to reach personal goals. We wonder whether learning the local
dialect would hurt our Chinese. We wonder how to learn the local dialect.
Most of all, we are on vacation.
Tomorrow we will fly to Taiwan, the first stop in our travel plans. From there
we will fly to Shanghai, where we will see my co-fellow, then on to go to
Zhejiang to visit Ida’s co-fellow. Train to Beijing to see my friend at Beida
and for Ida to interview for an internship before my Dad and Charlotte will fly
into Beijing and we will begin our travel with them. On to Harbin for two
freezing days of fun before flying to Xi’an for spring festival with Ida’s
co-fellow there. Another flight to Guilin to relax and bike around the
beautiful karst landscape of Yangshuo. Finally a short flight back to Kunming
and a long bus ride home to Dazhai before sending my Dad and Charlotte back to
Beijing and their flight home by way of Shanghai. Six weeks of travel. A wonderful
adventure ahead of us. Off we go into the air.
One of the better final projects for the project we did on my students' lives at the Middle School
Taiwan meets Dylan
Now, my Dad might say that Charlotte forced him to take this picture with her near the Temple of Heaven, but we all know she was actually humoring him.
