Teaching: week one
The weekend before the camp began was orientation. It was here we learned the structure of the camp, the schedule and who else was in our province. I met Ashley, our teacher, and Bertie, my co-volunteer. Ashely is a PhD student at WashU studying higher education systems across the world, and Bertie is a rising sophomore at university in England.
I was one of the few lucky students from UF because I had another UF studen, Phoebe, in my province, Province T, along with Jason.
As I’ve previously written, we had a two week prep course before going to China. In our demo/practice lesson plans, Jason gave us scenarios in which the “students” were unresponsive. Because of this, I expected the students to be unresponsive until they warmed up to our teaching methods. But the first few days, a majority of my class, Green T (the middle level English class within Province T), was excited and participated in the ice breaker activities.
There were some students from the beginning of camp to the end of camp that didn’t participate much or at all and seemed displeased to be there. Therefore, I didn’t know their names no matter how much I tried.
During the orientation days, Bertie and I decided to alternate activity days. So one week, I would plan speaking activities for Monday, Wednesday and Friday, while he planned Tuesday and Thursday. The next week would switch. We hoped this would confuse the students less and give each of us an equal amount of time to talk about English and American culture.
The first week, I planned activities about music and college life. During the music lesson, I introduced them to musical parodies and had them create their own. They had to pick a Chinese or American song, create their own funny lyrics in a group of five and then perform it for the class. A winner was determined based on creativity, humor and other parameters set in class. The winning group got shells, the camp currency which they could redeem in the camp store. We had parodies about the canteen food, the World Cup and even a few about being single! #foreveralone
The college life activity was a little more fun. I taught them how to play beer pong and flip cup! But without the alcohol, of course. In pong, the students had a partner on the opposite team whom they had to ask a question before throwing the ball. That partner then had to answer the question after the ball was thrown. If the question asked wasn’t a yes or no question, the first student had a second chance to throw the ping pong ball in the hopes of making it in the cup. Some questions were silly: “Who do you think is the prettiest girl in class?” But everyone was laughing and having a good time.
In flip cup, the teams of four had to make a sentence. After each player successfully flipped the cup, he or she said a word. If the four words didn’t make a sentence or the sentence didn’t make sense, the team had to start over. I increased the difficulty by then making the sentence eight words and then an eight word question during the third round. Any more than that would’ve confused a native speaker.
Bertie gave activities about music in the UK and strange sports. Cheese rolling is a thing and it’s odd. The YouTube videos of it are hysterical though!
The class was beginning to warm up to us and I was loving every minute!