China – Teaching Day 6

The American teachers shared a couple more leaf stories. These are really neat and fun to share. It helps us learn about each other while the Chinese teachers are learning about us. It also helps them understand American culture and the teaching process. Every teacher has addressed their professional life and what teaching means to them. This activity really helps address so many things. Not only is this activity good for here, but this is a great activity to really get staff to know each other.

Today’s icebreaker was the telephone game. As expected the story changed drastically through the transmission. We talked about why and how to do this with students. Specifically, we focused on rumors and being clear.

Music was used to pump up the whole group.

Homeroom

Bad Joke. Why did the Baker rob a bank? He needed the dough. We discussed the double meaning of dough. I added the additional joke of I was going to tell you a joke about a broken pencil, but there is no point.

Next, we had them compete in groups of four to make a ping pong ball cross a table. We processed why we did this with them. We asked the teachers why they thought we did this activity. They answered with team building, working together and building community. We also added focus. We asked them where their mood and thoughts were. Then we pointed out that this is an activity that will get kids to forget about things happening outside school (or in the hallways) and focused on schools.

Next we did an activity with a beachball. The beachball has a variety of words and questions written on it. Whoever catches the beachball has to answer the question or use the word in a sentence. Wherever the thumb lands determines the question/word. Thus, the student gets to determine which question/word that will be chosen.

Break ran over a bit as both of us were having rich conversations with different groups of students.

We introduced the idea of writing lessons using the Objective first and then writing the summative evaluation.

The food staff is made up of students. It is absolutely wonderful to see the change in them since the first day. They are much more talkative and expressive now. In one case, I had stopped into the teacher’s office area. I ended up giving a piece of chocolate to each of the kids. One of the kids asked for another piece. It was a great moment. Our translator/TA, who is an exceptionally wonderful college kid, asked me to excuse the kid because “he is young”. He went on to say that asking for more is generally considered rude. I told him that that was pretty much a universal thing. However, it was fine. The kids have been doing a good job and wanted to let them know that I appreciate what they are doing for us.

One of the other teacher’s classes appreciates my bad jokes. They want her to let them know what the bad joke of the day is. Humor is a great way to establish relationships.

Story Cubes. We had a teacher lead the group through the process. She did a wonderful job even though we had to switch the story cubes to action verbs instead of the nouns that they had been using.

Lesson Plans. Next we reviewed the lesson plan format with the teachers. Our focus was having them identify the objectives, standards and then summative assessment.

We also went to Old Beijing. This was a fun outing. We had a large group of several American teachers, some Chinese teachers and some of our Teaching Assistants. We rode the subway to the Old Beijing area. This was about a 40 minute ride. A large percentage of subway riders spent their ride engrossed in their phones. China also has video ads running outside the subway on the tunnel walls. Some of these were hilarious. We arrived and walked a short way to the popular area. This was filled with lots of lights and restaurants. Many of the restaurants had musicians playing in them. I later learned that this is kind of a proving ground for many musicians. The music was very good. We went to a couple of the small shops (we knew that there was one in particular that we wanted to go to). I picked up some leather bound journals. These are very neat and very affordable. We also went to a roof top bar for drinks and to listen to music. Unfortunately, by the time that we got back to the subway, we were too late. We were able to hail a cab and ride back to the hotel.