How I Learned to Love Grammar

Two of my students slicing and dicing during their “cooking presentation,” which consisted of a lot of chopping and very little speaking. (See below)

One of the unintended consequences of coming to China has been to realize just how much I love my job teaching history at CBC. Not that I don't love the experience of being here and teaching, and not that I don't really appreciate my students here--I do. It's just that teaching introductory language courses is very different from teaching college-level history courses, and now, by way of comparison, I can see just how well teaching history suits me (not that I ever took it for granted before), and perhaps, just how ill-suited I am for teaching language (especially grammar!). I feel lucky because most people don't get the rare opportunity to step out of their career for a moment and gain this kind of perspective. I would teach English again in a foreign country (including China), but it is clearly not my calling in life.

I probably knew this somewhere deep-down, but now it's been made explicit. Me and grammar, for example, just don't get along. They should conduct comprehensive personality checks on grammar teachers before hiring, and if you are comfortable arguing both sides of an issue or exploring things from multiple perspectives, then you should not be allowed near a grammar classroom. You should be quarantined because you are like the black plague to the grammar body, which remains healthy on a study diet of blind acceptance of strict rules. I'm the kind of person who can always find exceptions to basic rules and who questions the "correct" answers given, wondering if there are alternatives. This is the wrong approach with introductory students who just need to learn the basic rules that they will be tested on. Critical thinking, or second guessing the book's prescriptions, is just not constructive to my students. There is a right and wrong answer and little room for discussion.

This is not to say that I don't do a good job in the classroom and that I'm not enthusiastic or funny or even, maybe, sometimes, inspiring. I try to be all those things, but deep down I'm not thrilled to be in a language classroom like I am in a history classroom. It would be like teaching at an elementary school: I really could do it but I wouldn't be excited about it for much the same reasons that I'm not excited about teaching language: I don’t wake up in the mornings eager to explicate the difference between "infinitives and gerunds for uses and purposes," which is what I covered today.

Using humor is probably the most important way that I connect with my students at CBC. But it is very hard to translate my unique sense of humor (which many of my CBC students claim is marginal) to early language-learners. For one, my favorite types of humor in the classroom are dry--in fact, so dry that some would claim them to be a barren wasteland of humor. But nonetheless, I like to mix dry humor with a good deal of sarcasm and irony (oh, aren't I sophisticated). This mix of humor, which is so thrilling to about 5 out of every 45 of my CBC students, usually just falls flat here. This means that I am pushed to extremes, peddling ever more gaudy slapstick routines just to get a laugh (probably of embarrassment), while most of my students sit and stare with wrinkled foreheads wondering just exactly what the foreign teacher is up to now.

Today, for example, we were learning the names of various machines and then using those lovely infinitives and gerunds to describe the uses of these machines: "Robots are sometimes used to perform [infinitive] dangerous tasks." After defining robot, I claimed that I was indeed a robot, manufactured in Beijing, rather than a foreign teacher sent all the way from America. I showed them how well my skin had been manufactured and how realistic my features were, but complained that I needed maintenance for a squeaky shoulder and some crossed wires in my back. The squeaky elbow, with sound affects, actually got some good laughs. Also successful today was a joke that followed the sentence, "DNA fingerprinting is used for catching [gerund] thieves." Since the "th" sound is very hard for Chinese students, I had them repeat "thief" a number of times, and then, in animated mock protest, I exclaimed, "Hey, I'm not a thief, are you calling me a thief? I saw you! You were looking at me and hollering thief, etc..." This really got quite a few laughs. I ended the class with a deadpan, "Now I've got some really bad news for you. Class is over. I apologize. You cannot stay here and continue learning English. You have to go now." [The joke should work because my nineteen year-old Chinese students, like my nineteen year-old CBC students, are really eager to leave after 1 1/2 hours of class.] Once my students figured out I was joking, many of them laughed, but many of them were just perplexed, and I could see them wondering, "What is the bad news?"

I really knew I wasn't cut out to be a language teacher when the "fun" days were the most excruciating. Example: Making the students prepare food while narrating--a lesson which my colleague, a former fourth-grade teacher from Wisconsin (and God Bless both fourth grade teachers and Wisconsin) raved about--was just sheer, unbridled torture for me. Watching students who mostly cannot either cook or speak try to do both at the same time while making a mess in the classroom just did not seem like effective pedagogy. The worst part was that most of my students made fruit or vegetable salads, which required knives (it’s not wise to arm your students with sharp objects) and a great deal of chopping, meaning that students would say something like, "Now I will cut the carrot," followed by one minute or more of silent chopping, and then "Now I will cut the cucumber," followed by another silent period of chopping, etc... After two carrots and a cucumber, most students had used up their allotted time and had said three sentences. After having hauled bags of fresh produce to class, I couldn't bear to cut them off at three minutes (as my colleague told me to do), so all my classes went over time and I had students standing in the hallway waiting for their next class while other students used plastic grocery bags to wipe yogurt off the floor. It was a mess. And it was my fault. I can imagine many things that would have made the experience better, like preventing students from eating while others were performing. A rookie mistake, and one which I'll never benefit from having made because I'll never have students cook in class again. I guess when it comes right down to it, I'm kind of a traditionalist. I would rather have the students speak about abstract things than do "hands-on" learning. (Ironic, because Chinese teachers are supposed to be traditionalists and American teachers are supposed to be innovators...)

But my students had a lot of fun (I think). And I learned a lot. What did I learn?

I learned that most of my Chinese students have grown up eating more fresh fruit and vegetables than my American students. If I gave a similar assignment in the States, it is doubtful that so many students would have carted bags of vegetables to class. Instead they would have been squirting processed cheese on Ritz crackers. Clearly, my Chinese students do not eat as many packaged foods as my students in America, although, judging by the large Chinese grocery stores, that time is coming soon. Shortly, Chinese students will be making "smores" instead of fruit salads for their cooking presentations. Isn't "modernization" great!

I also learned that most of my students--even girls—never learned to cook (similar to American students), a fact that sort of surprised me. I naively thought that most Chinese children probably did a lot of helping out in the kitchen. I don't know whether it is because they are little "emperors" and "empresses" (offspring of China's "one-child policy" which encourages already doting Chinese parents to spoil their children), or because they are "rich-kids" whose parents can afford to pay for their education at the IEC, but these guys were mostly not trained in the culinary arts.

Even so, they managed to put together some foods that, although simple, tasted great, and sounded even better. "The Volcano is Snowing," for instance, consists of a pile of diced tomatoes with sugar on top. "The Heroes Gather" is a bunch of cut up root vegetables (including one called "The Heart is Beautiful") with some vinegar and salt.

Others were not as poetic: "Edible Fungus," "Edible Seaweed Soup," and "Bitter Scallion and Bland Noodles."

Ok, so in the end, it was actually pretty fun. I'm glad we did it.

Language lessons aside, interacting with my students is really a pleasure. They all come to class. They are all attentive (most the time). And they are really nice people. I'm told that our students in the International Exchange College are not very studious, making me think that Chinese students at elite universities must be pretty remarkable.

Straining to see the chopping presentations over banks of computer monitors. This is my only class that meets in a computer lab, which is not the best environment for anything but a computer class. These guys are actually “Network” majors, meaning that their English proficiency is even lower than my HR (Human Resources) and Travel majors. But they are one of the nicest groups of students you could have.

By the way, I’m also teaching seminars to faculty on American history and education, and those classes are more intellectually stimulating. More on that later.

Thanks for reading.

Dave