Uptown Girl + Lesson angst

Waiting for my hair to dry so I can pass out for many many hours.

I got back a little while ago from a little KTV excursion with Alice & her friends. KTV? That means karaoke actually. Something I discovered about myself: I can't sing Uptown Girl without a serious serious twang. I was like, whoa, all of a sudden from Kentucky. The place didn't have a wide selection of English songs (and no one else really knew any anyways), though I was able to jump in for part of a Jay Chou song I've heard before. I bet some of you have encountered it at bubble tea at one time or another. Alice put on "When I Fall in Love" for me, but another thing I discovere was that I know about 9 words of that song. Had some "black beer" that had a really nice toffeeish accent to it. Funny cuz I was just thinking earlier how much I missed darker beers.

It may be hard to imagine, but just try for a moment... I am soooo tired here. With more sleep and less work, I'm more exhausted on a daily basis in this country than I ever was at Cornell. I've been trying to figure out why. I mean... yes there was the Hohhot extravaganza, but that's not wholly unusual in essentials. Yesterday I had 5 hours worth of class, more or less back to back, and today I had 3 hrs... that doesn't seem to equate to any large amount of duress. So I dunno. Diet change? Also, my pseudo-ADD isn't really being fed, so maybe I'm just boring easily. Easily bored. Easy to be bored. Uh.

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Anyways, about that 3 hr class this morning. Yesterday I taught 3-6 at the hospital, then 7-9 at the training center. My lesson really depended on the students interacting and taking off on vibrant flights of fancy and just making shit up. For a game. I like activities since they give me a chance to move around the room and not just lecture which is stupid. Well, activities/discussions have been working fine at the training center, but yesterday was my first day back in the hospital in ages. And there were 7 people in attendance. And perhaps the game was too complicated.

You see, these people are adults. We can do simple activities, if I want my classes to be inane. But, and I feel failure in this, I could NOT, no matter how many different words I used how many times, get them to understand the point of the activity. The idea was to make a prediction, trade it with someone else, assume that a period time has passed and the prediction has come true, and answer questions based on that. So like "you will be a successful mother," for a question like "what do you do in your free time," begets an answer like "oh, I read to my children and help them with their homework." Even if you are childless. Like myself (some of the students made me answer several questions according to this one).

The training center made it through the interview because I physically enacted the process a few times. The hospital did not make it through the trade. So I moved on and ended up with a ton of extra time. And an ice cream bar. Which makes teaching at a white board difficult.

So not the most successful lesson, I'll be making that note. Then I learned that my next class would be 9-12 today. So I got a bit nervous that I would be unable to plan a good lesson in time, and be stuck with two strike-outs in a row. And last night I was nigh incoherent. My last act before bed was to make a skeleton of a few of the related concepts I've been wanting to address but for which I've been unable to gather the right resources. I basically decided that since I have the ability to motor in the morning (waking up is the tough part, but I've done some good work at 5am), I'd just get all the lyrics, reviews, poems, videos, and so on in the morning.

This morning I got up at 6 and managed it all by 8:30. I had printouts and everything. A series of websites open on my laptop full of news and pictures and so on. Cuz this was a fucking 3 hour class. Who even does that?

I opened with the poems. First one by Robert Frost. The idea is that poetry from that era, with ample examples from Frost, have a definite rhyme scheme, so you can always be sure that certain words are always going to sound alike. This was a good check for my kids last year (not to be underestimated for being 8th graders) for pronunciation for some words that looked different. More importantly, poems like Stopping By Woods have lines with very specific syllable allowances and predictable, consistent stress patterns. This is not a luxury that speakers often get, right? And Chinese speakers especially add random syllables here and there and get confused about multisyllable stress. So I just wanted to show them a way to practice.

That was sort of to harken back to the last class. Then I followed up with a modern poem that I found. Full of nice descriptors, idioms, and metaphor. Also an easy concept to grasp. Here I wanted to show what poetry has become-- you know, a vehicle for expression and so on. And you know, a ton of our language, things we say all the time, take cues from devices that you find everywhere in poetry. No one learns figurative language straight off in an esl class, and I noticed when we did song lyrics that the whole metaphor/symbol/allusion thing wasn't getting across. I suspected that they were taking things too literally, so I just wanted to give them an introduction to that.

Then a Guster song. One, trying to pinpoint what type of music they're willing to listen to. Would have discussed the lyrics if we had time (when we actually did, I'd forgotten that I hadn't done that, so that was my flub). But mainly I wanted them to talk to me about the song. As an example I added a clip of a music snob review of the album it came from. No expectations of them understanding this piece, because music reviews can be pretty dizzying (this one was a bit kinder though). But I wanted to show them what loaded words are like, and why we use them, and that we use them all the time. Adjectives that we commonly use, and adjectives that the dude made up on the spot. Different ways that we use words that have certain technical meanings ("bipolar" for example). I was hoping for some discussion of the song. But, silence.

By that time, I wanted to change the pace a bit, so I broke out some movie trailers for The Lake House, The Guardian, and Stranger than Fiction. Little discussion arose, so I finished with a short National Geographic video of salt mines and desert crossings. I will admit now that iTunes has been a nice resource for free stuff. This was the point that Connie came back in.

I may have mentioned her before, but she is in charge of this class, and when she's in the room, she dominates it. You know... I like her. I like most people. But ooh. I'll get to that later. Anyway, she was called out at the very beginning of class to identify some dead birds, so she basically missed everything before the salt mine video.

Then, because yesterday she'd said something about American food being simple (to the effect of hamburgers and hot dogs), I had some menu examples and photos of restaurant food. Unfortunately, she and her son were the only ones from yesterday's class to realize that this was a response to something.

After that, she was called out again. So I decided that for the last 30 min we could go back to the review and define some words so they could read it later. No one asked me any questions! So I just went through and defined a lot of things I thought they might not be able to interpret on their own (right every time). Connie came back in and looked at the review. With 10 minutes left she gave me a criticism of my lesson. She said that I jumped from topic to topic so much in one lesson that it wasn't good.

So criticism. Whatever. I need that. But actually she wasn't in class. Additionally, she did this during class time in both Chinese and English. She said it nicely, but I was still like... thanks? For nothing! I don't know, but I just feel inherently that I would have done it differently. The thing was, she asked the other students if they agreed, and none of them said anything! It would have been more helpful if someone had agreed. Or if someone had said that the lesson was helpful. Any response. As it is, I have yet another opinion from Connie about how class should be.

Now, I have my own criticisms about the class. Having gone through it point by point, I see where maybe I could have expanded on something. It's just something I didn't see until now. But also, it's clear that for the hospital class, I'm having a lot of trouble facilitating discussion. The training center has great discussions-- it's a blast. I can ask them all the questions I want and lead them whatever direction, and they're responsive (except for yesterday, when they thought I was crazy). This troubles me because I can't yet figure out why this is happening. I'm going to e-mail their last teacher, Tevie, who's been great about answering my Baotou questions thus far. Apparently Connie loved her class. I've checked out Tevie's formula though, and it's like... nothing out of the ordinary. So she was a theatre major. And like 50. But still. I'm youthful and exuberant. Talk to me, dammit!

I mean, please don't get me wrong. The students are really awesome people. But they're not the best students. And by students, I mean, the role of the student. Like, you can be a good student by working hard, and they do. But I mean, when I am a student, no matter what my other classes have been like, when I place myself in a class, I understand that I am placing myself at the mercy of my teacher. If they want me to speak, I will speak. If they say that this is the way to learn something, I will try it. You know? They take the initiative to take this class. It's voluntary and it cost money. Why wouldn't they take the initiative to ask me questions when they don't understand something? Or to simply follow me when I try to lead them somewhere? I have never been in a class where the teacher was unable to get this same reaction. So I'm troubled. I can keep trying new techniques, but I really can't do anything particulary exciting or fun unless I know that they're with me. Or until they give me some response to tell me what they think is exciting or fun. I expected to have figured this out by now. I mean, whatever the problem is, it's mine-- not theirs. So I'm not blaming them. I'm just referencing their behavior to indicate that there is some failing in the way I approach them.

But I was still really steamed about the way Connie made her comment. I described the whole thing to Alice later, and she told me not to pay attention to it. You know, after our first full lesson there, she complained about the structure while another student told us how much she enjoyed it. Since then it's been really crappy trying to find a balance for them. Of course I'm going to consider it though. But it's like... I may have been jumping topic to topic, but those were just tools for me to teach a theme. I wanted to demonstrate the flexibility English has in describing things as subjective as music or feelings, and I wanted to show them common resources like poems and reviews-- places where we've picked up words and speaking skills. But I should have explained that more clearly at the beginning.

Also, and this shocked me back to reality, it turns out that Connie was partially basing this on the fact that the review didn't make any sense. As in, she thought that the review of the music was a review of the lesson. I forgot that a noun like that could be misinterpreted. Again, my fault. It's just not the easiest thing to assess just what words they know and what words they don't. I mean, they're doctors. They know "tuberculosis." Then again, she also missed that part of the lesson.

The worst is just the silence. I try to give them opportunities to emote and practice speaking, but they either just stare straight at me or anywhere else. During the poetry thing, I did get a lot of head nodding though. I didn't move on until I saw heads nodding-- since they were giving me that, I latched onto it.

It's not that I think they're being withholding for one reason or another. But in any case, I haven't been able to get what I want out of them yet, so it's back to the drawing board for Saturday.