A week away from Shanghai promised to be a breath of fresh air metaphorically and literally and I was up for it. I was promised a nice hotel and what I got was the only hotel in the town. Mind you it was a new building and not had time to get too dilapidated yet – that will come in time. The view from the hill over the town was lovely and the rooms were huge and clean.
I was there with a colleague to do some teacher training with a group of teachers from the four primary schools in the town. There was much excitement around our arrival and a car was despatched to Ganzhou airport to pick us up. The training rooms at the town’s teacher training centre were getting their final coat of paint as we arrived – we were the first to hold sessions there.
However, the first thing we were required to do was to go to one of the schools and do a demo lesson. I got number 3 and number 4 schools and although I had heard about the class sizes, nothing can prepare you for the sight of 70 children sitting smartly at their desks with their books open and pen in hand. Not a sound was heard as 70 pairs of young eyes stared at you. I decided to do a lesson on clothes vocabulary and had prepared by bringing a load of old clothes.
The balloons I had brought caused quite a ruckus in the room as the children tried to reach for them. The exercise involved teams of students bursting the balloons, getting the descriptions of the clothes from the papers inside the balloons and then sending one person from each team to the front to put on the clothes. The whole thing collapsed into bedlam and all the students ran to the front and pulled at the clothes, trying to put on as many as possible irrespective of what they were supposed to put on! anyway they had fun and maybe learnt something along the way.
After my own demo lesson I had to sit through a lesson from a local teacher and talk to her and her colleagues about what I thought of the class and how I would improve it. To be honest, what can these teachers do but get the children to recite sentences?
I felt sorry for them. There are so few resources and so many children in a class (class sizes of 70 is common in rural China). I tried to suggest activities which the children could do without leaving their desks because they certainly couldn’t do a running around activity with the amount of space they have in the room. All I could think of was pair work and Chinese whispers. Luckily I have never had to teach in a Chinese state school and I hope never to have to because although the students are a delight, it’s depressing not getting to know there names or anything about them.
Each of the teachers in these schools have 200 students (3 classes of between 65 and 70) and try but don’t always succeed in learning their names.