Culture Shock and Co-teaching

They told us, again and again, in fact, that it would come to this. At some point, they said, you will experience culture shock. I just didn't expect my first culture shock to come through our placement process.

We still don't know our schools.

What we've concluded is that we are being sacrificed to guanxi: the city-county merge happened in January; our county placements were the first project of a new head honcho; there's an election coming up in January. So, if there's a way, we're going out to county. Too many relationships would have to be broken to change it. Time to get used to the culture!

But we got to co-teach today! Since we didn't have our school assignments yet, we were all randomly assigned to a school league, and I was assigned to League C, with Hou-jing and Oil Refinery Elementary Schools. So today, I got to co-teach with Cecilia, who is absolutely amazing, and tomorrow I get to co-teach with Tracy, who is fantastic as well. There are 3 leagues in each classroom, so I was also working with Esther and Andrew, who were paired with Leagues A & B.

Our class was wonderful! We have sixteen 4th grade students, 8 boys and 8 girls, all of whom are energetic and adorable. I think my favorite part was our twin boys, Johnny and Vincent, who began the day refusing to participate and ended it with their hands shooting up with every new question: Teacher, I know, I know!

We began the day with the ETAs leading plenty of games, including a name game and hangman (Esther led), Volcano (Andrew lea), Rhythm and Bingo (I led), and Teacher Says (we all led). After that we each had 20 minute lessons which we delivered with one of our co-teachers. I went last (afternoon in the heat--yuck!); Esther and Priscilla began with a lesson on taste (sweet, sour, salty, bitter); then Andrew and Rebecca (LET) went with a lesson on things you do right now (ie watching TV, doing homework). They were all stupendous; quite intimidating to see how easily they both interacted with the kids. Andrew especially had a great report going with them; by the end of the day they had a nickname for him and everything.

Then it was my turn. Cecilia and I co-taught a lesson on emotions; we taught happy, sad, tired, and angry, and the sentence patterns "I am..." and "He/She is..." It went pretty well, I think--we got great feedback after--but it was hard for me to see how un-talkative the kids were when they weren't simply repeating after me or using their new sentence patterns. When, for instance, I would say things like, "you want to win, right?" I would get blank stares. Something to work on in my actual classroom.

I'm tired, so that's it for now. I co-teach again tomorrow--with a story I wrote today about animals--so maybe then I'll have more details!