ESL Teacher Life

{at a local high school in ShenZhen, China}

If I had my way with blog post titles, they'd always be ridiculously long. Today we're back to #ChinaLife. The other Rachael will be talking a little bit about her job working in a private international school in ShangHai. I'm talking about what working life looks like for us these days.

{sometimes we take pictures of each other in our work clothes while waiting for our bus}

We both teach conversational English classes at a local high school. Our high school has about 3,000 live-in students, which means that as far as student population goes, it's 3/4ths the size of the college we attended!

Of those 3,000 students, I teach 10 classes (each class once per week) of about 50 students each, and Angel teaches 18 classes (each class once every other week) of about 50 students each. That means that I have about 500 students and Angel has about 900 students. I teach the equivalent of 10th grade and Angel teaches the equivalent of 11th grade.

We don't have a classroom of our own--at our school, the classrooms stay with the students, so I teach in 10 different classrooms and Angel teaches in 18 different classrooms. Some of Angel's classrooms are on the 6th floor which require a long walk up, up, up! We don't have any assigned curriculum, just the mission to help our students move from the English theory classes they've been taught for years to actually being able to communicate in the English language. We create our own lessons based on what we determine are our classes' interests and greatest needs (this week's lesson in my class was on semi-advanced preposition use, Angel's lesson was on terminology used in comparing and contrasting, with the difference between Chinese and American high schools as the theme).

Besides the class schedule, we also jointly lead a weekly "English Corner." English Corner can mean many different things, in this case, it happens to mean gathering up approximately 100 11th graders outside and leading them in games that encourage English speaking, letting them interview us, or teaching them how to swing dance. Even though I'm loud, I'm usually given a loudspeaker when leading English Corner, and I feel very important when I have a loudspeaker in my hands.

Schedules don't tend to be set far in advance, so we tend to go into work with a "Be prepared at all times" mentality. The first time we led English Corner, we didn't know we were doing so until about 2 minutes before. Good thing that I have the kind of personality where I'm not flustered or stressed by that sort of thing! Also, it's a good thing that I let youth group games for years so I have a never-ending dictionary of games in my head...

Other duties generally include being the go-to English speaker for any extracurricular needs: spell-checking and editing for coworkers or students, and helping students with special projects. Angel helped one of his students create a list of interview questions to prepare for interviewing an astronaut who came to visit our school, and then acted like he was the astronaut in a mock-interview in order to give her a chance to get comfortable with the questions and format. Our ambitious students like to chat with us during class breaks to get natural conversation practice, something that is incredibly rare for them. The other day we helped brainstorm student speech topics for controversies about holidays (are holidays wasteful? over-commercialized? Should religious holidays be celebrated by people who don't share that religion?).

Probably the most challenging part of the job is designing lessons that get all 50 students involved and talking and hopefully learning and growing more comfortable in their second language. During time that I give them to work on projects in groups or pairs, I often wander the classroom to randomly ask questions of students. Sometimes when I ask a student a question, they'll say "Sorry, my English is very poor." But that's not quite good enough for me. I'll respond with a grin, "That means you need to practice your English more, right?" and I'll do what I can to keep them talking for a bit longer.

I had one of those encounters the other day with a boy who sits in the back of class and I asked him to just tell me a sentence, any sentence, that used the word however. He responded with a sentence that actually contained perfect grammar (a rarity in my grade level) and I about jumped out of my skin with congratulating him. The look of joy on his face when he said, "Really? It was correct?" was priceless.

We have a huge range of abilities among our classes. Students who can't put three-word sentences together are lumped in with students who are effectively fluent but just have large, random gaps in their vocabulary. We try our best to include all students and their levels equally in our lessons but don't always succeed.

Our students are largely well-behaved. Occasionally they try to do homework for other classes or sleep during our class, but those students are a small minority. They always greet us when they walk by in the hallways, either with a "Mrs. Rachel/Mr. Angel, Hello!" or the Mandarin "Lao Shi Hao." Sometimes they sneak their cellphone into class and ask us to please not tattle to their head teacher, but they really want to take a picture of the American teacher to send to their parents (my face is all over social media, I have no doubt of it).

Angel's claim to fame at the school is his sports interest. He plays basketball after work with our coworkers once or twice a week, and attends the students' basketball tournaments to cheer for his classes. He also, famously, walked on his hands in the introductory lesson for all of his classes, so that his students would know what kind of teacher they had. I seem to be best known for my looks (awkward). Once I was chatting with two boys and they saw Angel in the distance, asked if he was my husband, and then one told me: "Your husband is very handsome!" and the other boy added, "But you are really beautiful!" There's something about speaking a 2nd language which means that the compliments are more direct than they otherwise would be. My students aren't shy to compliment themselves, either. I had several students introduce themselves to me: "Hello, my name is...... I am a very handsome boy." I love these teens so very much.

I've read blogs before that claim that teaching ESL overseas is hard. I mentioned that to Angel and he scoffed. To be fair, he worked as a hospital nurse in a PCU unit for 5 years, so his definition of  a "hard job" might not be the same as the definition in the mind of the average liberal arts major with a brand new B.A. who wants to see the world.

This is not a hard job. You can probably already tell, it's not even a full 40 hr. per week job. It's not for everyone, but for me it's the kind of job that I can wake up excited to go to every single day. Sure, there's overarching problems with the ESL teaching system overseas. I don't like it that some of the ESL teachers I know openly state that they dislike children. I think the kids deserve better than that. I know that most of my students will never ever be 100% fluent in English. But to me, this is a very, very good job, and one I'm blessed to have for this season.