Fuddland

My experiences teaching English to Chinese students at an English language training centre in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China.

This category is a subcategory of Teaching in China.

One of my summer school students shows off his chimpanzee-in-a-car drawing for the camera.

One of my colleagues cheered me up no end today — not that I was particularly grumpy, aside from the usual headache the kids at the summer school give me, but he gave me an extra boost in his attempt to make a phone call.

He sat down at his desk, picked up the phone and dialled a number. Just as he finished dialling, one of the other phones in the office started to ring. We were the only two in there, and since I’m not paid to answer the phones [and, moreover, my Chinese isn’t really up to dealing with course enquiries], he put down his phone, dashed over to the other one and answered it. But he was too late: the person had hung up.

So back he went and resumed his call. Except the same thing happened: just as he finished dialling, the other phone rang. So, as before, he stopped what he was doing and went to answer the incoming call.

I’m sure you’ve all guessed what was going on, but apparently he hadn’t, so as he scooted on over to the other phone again I felt I had to ask him, nice and innocently if, by any chance, it was he who was calling that other phone. I wish I’d let him do it a few more times without saying anything, just to see how many it took for him to cotton on.

One of my more enjoyable teaching duties is the weekly “English Corner”: a two-hour session open to the public, in which anyone wishing to practise speaking English can come along and talk with other like-minded people and three or four native English speakers. It’s my duty to select the general topic of conversation each week, which we are supposed to discuss in small groups whilst supping tea, but in practice the topic gets forgotten about in the first few minutes and most of the evening’s conversations begin with, “So, in your country…?” I like chatting with the regulars, finding out as much about Chinese life as they do about my culture.

The people who come along are all very nice; some are a little too keen to talk and don’t give others a chance to speak, and some just want to listen until they feel confident enough to contribute. But recently I’ve been suffering a certain level of chagrin due to having developed a few “fans” amongst the attendees, who go out of their way to sit as close to me as possible and direct all their comments at me, instead of talking with the rest of the group. There are a few women who delight in telling me several times a week what a handsome man I am. [My outward, bashful, modest acceptance of their compliment disguises my internal monologue, which is along the lines of, “Run away! Run away! They want a husband!”] And anytime I say something vaguely intelligent — or whenever I demonstrate that I know a little Mandarin — there’s a general buzz of, “So smart, so smart. Doctor is doctor.” This latter statement is a literal translation of a Chinese saying whose meaning seems to be, “People with PhDs are clever.” Profound.

One chap in particular makes me incredibly self-conscious, not only because he’s verges on the sycophantic with his praises of my intellect, teaching ability and general outlook on life, but also because, whenever we’re speaking, not only does he have a habit of repeating the last few words of my sentences — this is fair enough, helping him improve his English — but he also mimics whatever hand gestures I’m using at the time, gesture-for-gesture. I’ve never been so aware of how often I use my hands when making a point or explaining something, and I’m torn between sitting on my hands, and making outrageously flamboyant gestures just to see if he adopts them.

In general, the teaching materials I’ve been provided with have been of a high standard; easy to teach from and well thought-out, but there’s one exception: I teach the employees of a five-star hotel twice a week, and the main textbook consists of long, very boring articles about various aspects of the hotel business, together with comprehension questions and discussion topics. The whole thing is way, way too advanced for the students, using complex words and phrasings to get across what are usually quite simple ideas.

But the worst thing is, sometimes the English is just plain wrong. It looks like the book was written by a Chinese person [or persons] whose English is obviously of an extremely high standard, but it does occasionally fall foul of the dictionary trap, in which they’ve looked up a Chinese phrase in a dictionary and simply copied the translation — anyone who has used an online translator knows how unreliable this approach is. When the results aren’t simply nonsense, the words are not ones that would generally be chosen by a native speaker. Here are a few examples taken from the chapter I taught last night, on the subject of handling complaints.

If the travel agent contacts his clients with a questionnaire about such evaluation items as “Did you enjoy your holiday? Have you any complaints?”, he will not only get valuable feedback from clients but also create a prosperous corporate image.

A questionnaire about evaluation items? No. And when was the last time you used the word prosperous, apart from when wishing someone a happy New Year?

Complaints may occur in various situations, but many are indispensably connected with the work and attitudes of the employees of the industry.

At a stretch, they might mean invariably, not indispensably. But then there’s the related discussion question, which contains the common Chinese misuse of should, “What should indispensably lead to guests’ complaints?”

Tourists expect a variety of information from travel directions to explaining unfamiliar items on menus, where and what to see and do at destination, as well as knowledge about the history and tradition of the places they are visiting. Tourists tend to regard all these as the source of answers to their questions. Therefore it should be emphasized on training staff on offering information as clearly and as accurately as possible.

Tend to regard all what? Information on what to see and do is the source of answers to their question about what to see and do? You don’t say.

Before you do anything, you need to listen and make sure you understand what is being said. This avoids misunderstanding and show your heartfelt care and willing to help.

I think I’d get a little uncomfortable if hotel staff told me they had heartfelt caring for my complaint.

To agree with the complainer is another good way of calming him down, usually because he expects you may rush to the defense of whoever is in the wrong. Never lose your temper on all occasions. Just have him out of his system might be the only solution.

Okay, what? “Usually because he expects you may…”? “Never … on all occasions.”? “Just have him out of his system…”? It was by this stage in the text I was ready to suggest using the book to make papier mache models of each other for the remainder of the class time.

Worse still, the accompanying audio CD sounds like the articles are being read aloud, word-for-word, by whatever native English speaker happened to be passing at the time. There’s background noise, stumbling over words, and a general lack of clarity from the speaker. And it’s hard to hear someone say something like, “Just have him out of his system might be the only solution”, without wasting the rest of the class explaining exactly what he meant to say. I know the students aren’t going to be fluent by the end of the course, but usually they expect I may teach them heartfeltedly.

There’s a rumour going round that my visa application has finally gone through, and that my passport now contains a valid working visa for the full year.

I’m going to remain healthily dubious until I’ve seen it with my own eyes, later this afternoon. Fingers crossed…

In an un-deliberate scheme to mar my St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, I was asked to swap my usual Sunday off work for another day and give a short, early morning demo class to twenty primary school students; the first half was to be a general warm-up, the second based on a science textbook. This was all fine with me — I knew I could keep things relatively simple, play a few word games, and it’d be over pretty quickly.

What they failed to tell me — in what is fairly-typical Chinese boss style — was that the demo class wasn’t just for the twenty students. Thus I found myself, not in a classroom, but in the school hall, on stage, microphone in hand, performing The David Show for around a hundred parents and children. The twenty eleven- or twelve-year-olds specially selected to be my demo students were, thankfully, already of a good standard of English, but none had brought along paper or pens, so there was a frantic few minutes while — at my insistence — enough writing tools were located to enable them to do some of the work I’d planned for the “class”.

I decided to pretend the audience wasn’t there at all and treat things as a normal lesson — bar having to run over to each student when they stood up to answer a question so they could speak into the microphone — and it all went very smoothly. I must have done something right because, during the scheduled five-minute break between halves, my boss told me I didn’t need to bother carrying on with the second half. He pointed to the back of the hall and I saw most of the parents were already signing-up their children to be taught by our training centre. So I just sat on the edge of the stage and chatted with whichever little ‘un came up to me [usually at their mother’s urging, although I did teach a few of them last month; these kids were very happy to see me again and I was treated to plenty of hugs and stroking of my hair].

As I left the school I noticed a rather disturbing statue outside the main hall, which seemed to be a depiction of a rare sex education class: “That’s right, these are called ‘breasts’.”

For the first few weeks after I arrived in China, whenever I overheard a couple of elderly gents chatting in Chinese on a park bench, I found myself assuming that they were exchanging pearls of wisdom garnered from their experiences and learned readings of the teachings of Confucius. It wasn’t until I started to get a handle on understanding Mandarin that I realised that, most of the time, they’re talking about food, or the price of food, or how long its been since breakfast time.

On the first day of a new Business English course for an insurance company, held in their office meeting room, I gave them a few minutes of conversation practice based on the dialogues we had just gone through, and as they chatted to each other I wandered over to the display cabinet to look at the various certificates, plaques and trophies it contained. Given the intense growth of China’s economy in recent years, and having met and taught more than a few business professionals out here, I was assuming that they were all very serious “Business of the Year”-type awards. Office employees can work very long and hard hours — eight in the morning until eleven or twelve at night is the norm rather than the exception — so their efforts have to be occasionally rewarded with some sort of recognition, right?

Having learned a few characters of Chinese, I was able to spend a few minutes trying to figure out exactly what each achievement was. The largest trophy — a gold cup with an engraved plaque on its base — caught my eye, and I could immediately recognise the characters for Sūzhōu (苏州) and the industrial park area in which many new companies are based, and the date: December 2002.

“Okay,” I thought, “this is going to be something like Best New Start-up or Employer of the Year.” But then I recognised two more characters: (乒) and (乓) — pīng and pāng.

Yep: ping pong. It was a table tennis championship trophy. Disappointed, I turned back to the class to check on the progress of the business conversation exercise I had set.

They were all talking about food.

My first couple of days at my new language school haven’t been too bad: just a couple of hours of preparatory work each day. My first teaching session is tonight, taking over a third of the way through a “Hotel English” course where, yes, we work through a textbook specially written for people who work in the hotel industry wanting to improve their English skills.

Later this week we begin a week-long intensive course for schoolchildren [poor little tykes, they’re only just on holiday leading up to Chinese New Year and their parents enroll them in extra English classes], which sees me teaching not only general English but also science- and geography-based classes. I’m quite looking forward to this as it’ll make a change from the usual, quite bland [in the eyes of both teacher and student] English textbooks to be teaching various real-world factoids [I do love a good factoid].

[Meta-factoid of the day: factoid should really be used to describe a statement that seems plausible and has been repeated and believed so often as to be assumed to be true, rather than my usage here, which was intended to mean a little fact; perhaps factette is a better word for this latter meaning. Although isn’t that a female fact (cf. Smurfette)?]

Anyway. Whilst I’ve found the new employers to be a little more receptive to my input and a lot more easy-going in general, there is a certain trait which appears to be common to all the Chinese language school managers that I’ve dealt with, or heard about: the, “Hey, could you waste your time doing something that’s clearly not necessary?” request, as exemplified by the conversation I had this morning, which went something like this:

Manager

Okay, so, David, can you prepare a syllabus for the whole week with what you are going to teach, so we can photocopy the pages from the textbook to make into a booklet to show to the parents?

David

Well, we don’t know the abilities of any of the students yet, and won’t know what speed we’re going to be able to move at, until the first one or two lessons — and each subject only has between three and eight classes over the seven days anyway — so I think it would be a waste of time, not to mention paper and money, to prepare a whole booklet in advance. How about I make a plan for just the first class of each subject and then each day we will be able to add more material, so by the end they have a booklet of the material we have actually covered?

Manager

Okay. But we should have something to show the parents, so can you prepare the material in advance for the whole week?

David

Er, as I say, there’s really no point in doing that. The syllabus will definitely change as soon as we start teaching. We could show the parents the original textbooks on the first day and explain that we will be choosing material from them based on their child’s needs and abilities as the week progresses.

Manager

Okay. Can you prepare a rough plan of what we will do during the week?

David

Yes I can, but it is likely to be a randomly-chosen subset of the contents page of the book with a disclaimer on it saying that the plan will change according to the students’ abilities.

Manager

Yes, that will be okay, the parents will understand.

David

But won’t they understand if you just show them the textbook and explain how we will choose what pages to do?

Apparently not. This happened so many times at my last job too: the parents/clients always want to see a syllabus, even if it’s hastily typed-up with no real substance to it, and even if they are also told that it will change as soon as the course starts. [No-one ever complained that we weren’t following the syllabus to the letter.] I don’t understand what’s wrong with saying, “Look, we’re going to be using this textbook — see, it has lots of nice pictures and plenty of things to do, and a nice shiny CD to listen to — but we won’t have time for everything so I’m going to choose what pages we’ll do as we go along, depending on what speed we can go at, what your strengths and weaknesses are, and what you find interesting. ‘Kay?”

Sometimes I’m tempted to put in bogus activities simply to see whether anyone reads the syllabuses in any detail:

Lesson One: the art of networking at conferences.
Lesson Two: making telephone calls — taking and leaving messages.
Lesson Three: procuring the expertise of a balloon fetishist.
Lesson Four: how to converse in a lift made of jelly.
Lesson Five: taking part in conference calls.
Lesson Six: dining in Western restaurants.