Struggle Sessions (i.e., Corporate Class)

Yesterday went poorly. Just before break I began another corporate class, again at a high-tech firm, and the classes hadn't been going all that well in the first few weeks.

After a three week break, I returned bright and early to the company for another class. (Class meets at eight in the morning, meaning that I have to get up before the sun to make it on time.) But I felt sure that, since everyone had gotten almost a month's break and since so many things had happened during that break (snowstorms, bad traffic, Spring Festival), that the students would be a bit more lively. In all of my other adults classes, any preparation I'd done was largely wasted, since everyone just wanted to talk about their vacations.

Just ten minutes before class, I got my first bad omen, a text-message from Whitetooth: "Before [the class] I should tell you some of the [company] students seem to think you don't like China, so maybe try to avoid any Mao jokes." Fifteen minutes after the start of class, when the second through ninth students finally showed up for the class, I got my second bad omen. Since the first student to arrive and I had been discussing our vacations, I opened the same topic up to the rest of the class: "Did anyone do anything interesting over the holidays? ... How about you, Apple? ... How about you, Girl-with-boy's-name? ... How about you, Racial-slur?"

Since this series of questions yielded nothing but downcast eyes and a lot of chatter in Chinese, I turned to the textbook, attempting to get them to read parts in a conversation aloud. This went a little better, but I was met with strong resistance whenever I attempted to correct pronunciation. Since the unit in the book was about illness and advice, I tried to set them up in pairs to complain about an illness and offer advice, but this went over poorly. We slowly, oh so slowly, worked our way through the tedious grammar section of the unit, then I had them work again in pairs, this time on a cloze exercise, in which one student was meant to play a doctor while the other played a patient.

After two minutes of simply reciting the exercise instructions aloud, they lapsed into speaking Chinese again. I tried near the end of class to open up a general discussion again, and met with failure on five different conversation topics. Thankfully, time had run out, so I took the time to pull Racial-slur aside and explain the problem with his name to him. He seemed grateful, but who knows. After I'd finished speaking with him, another student approached to tell me, "We think you should give us more chances to talk and reading." I said I'd do my best to do so during the next class, leaving it unsaid that I'd given all of them numerous chances to speak and to read, chances they'd chosen not to take.

This is an all too common phenomenon in adults classes here: the solid block of awkward silence, followed by a request to "let" students talk more. Somehow, they expect the teacher to make them talk, and there's nothing they really seem to want to say. I managed to hold back from any criticism, but was sorely tempted to say at the end of class, "China I like. It's classes like this I don't like--classes where people don't even have the common decency to show up on time, then don't make any effort to do any work in class." So between now and next week, I'm going to try and figure out something to do during class--something exciting and entertaining (and probably useless for learning)--just so that I don't start bleeding from biting my tongue too hard.