teacher seminar

One of the last things I did in Songyuan was teach a section in an eight day seminar for 200 English teachers from Songyuan public schools. The teachers were all Chinese and taught mostly at the middle and high school levels.

My school sold the program to the education department, which the owner had deep ties to (recall Happy Songyuan English Speaking Contest). The seminar had four sections, with one foreigner teaching each: American Culture (my section), Classroom Language, Pronunciation & Intonation and Communication & Presentation. The teachers came to us in groups of 50 and we had each group for day and a half. At the end of the seminar each teacher was supposed to give a short presentation and there was a written test.

When I was first told about the seminar, the foreign teacher/business development consultant guy at my school that had helped the school's owner set up the whole thing said he had all the material and such for each section, we just had to present his stuff. The department of education ended up making changes to the length of the seminar and the desired content the night before we started, so a lot of that went out the window anyway, but once I went through my section of the "prepared" material, I ended up just tossing it anyway. The guy had literally just pulled headings and entire sections off wikipedia for each section. I am amazed as to how it fooled anyone as being a solid program of original material, but that is neither here or there. The material for me honestly read like it might not have even been written by an American, so I just made up my own.

Even though it was a lot of extra work that I essentially didn't get paid for, I really did love the seminar. It was a continuation of my favorite part of my regular Oil Adults 2 class, a mutual conversation about culture, so an opportunity for me to learn as well.

Having never taught in a public school, unlike most of my coworkers, I went into the seminar with little to no expectations, and I was STILL surprised. The English teachers did not speak English. Most of my regular students have a better grasp of the language than the teachers did. We foreigners had Chinese translators translating literally every word we said and translating the teachers' questions and such back to us. Many of them didn't even try to use English and speak directly to me.

In each section there were maybe one or two, three tops, people with a solid enough grasp on the English language to actually have a conversation with me. I knew that the focus for English language teaching in the Chinese education system is reading and writing, but the lack of verbal communication skills still came as a shock.

Over the course of the seminar, I was also surprised to learn that many of the teachers had not been to university and many of them had no English training at all (so the above made sense), they had been math or science teachers that the school just arbitrarily reassigned to teach English. And these were supposed to be the "best" English teachers in Songyuan. Scary.

The biggest surprises of the whole thing though came on test day. The four foreigners teaching consisted of myself, the business development consultant guy, the school VP and then another American guy in his early 30s. As usual, nothing was communicated to anyone ahead of time as to how the test would work logistically, but the other American guy and I figured between the development guy and the VP being there, everything would get figured out. Boy, were we wrong.

The morning of that day was for the individual presentations, which was easy enough, and the afternoon was for the written test. The first major problem came when the development guy and the VP never came back from lunch. And didn't answer their phones. And neither did the school owner. 

After about an hour's worth of running around trying to figure out if they were coming back or not and searching for an appropriate room to administer the test that wasn't locked (and yes, this did involve marching all 200 teachers all over a high school), we finally settled on keeping the teachers in their groups of 50 and keeping each group in a separate classroom to take the tests. That left the American, myself, a Chinese school admin and a Chinese TA to administer and monitor the 200 teachers taking the test in these four rooms.

Observing the testing process was mind blowing. Every single one of them would have failed in an American testing setting. They ALL cheated. They were taking out notes, phones, dictionaries and books. They were talking loudly to each other and walking around the room to see others' answers. I could literally hear them going down their answers sheets reading, "A, B, D, C, C, A…" to each other and trading test papers, not even trying to hide it. Nothing we said could stop them or even make them feel like they should bother trying to be discreet. The American and I were just blown away.

There was a short break after the allotted testing time and THEN the others from my school came back, finally, and we got everyone together into an auditorium. The American guy and I made the "I'm disappointed in you guys" speech, which I can't say I ever imagined I'd be doing to hundreds of other adults. We accepted some responsibility, but expressed just how shocked we were, why and what needed to change according to western standards.

Cheating is such an accepted part of culture here, but to see it in action like that, and from teachers no less… wow. It made me feel really depressed. Many of them couldn't even understand that they should be embarrassed.