Friday, January 26, 2007

Serve the Servants....Teach the Teachers

So after the school told me that I wasn't teaching the Kids for the final week of Classes they dropped the bombshell that instead we would be teaching the teachers. While we were only told about this a few days in advance Kristina, the older lady from America who th school hold only just slightly below Chairman Mao in their opinions, was told about it over a month ago and had prepared power point slide shows and full lesson plans.

We were told that we would work in pairs and would each teach two 45 minute lessons. We thought that this sounded very easy and that we could probably get away with preparring a 30 minute lesson and just field questions for the remainder. This, China Being China and Sandy being Sandy, was of course wrong. It turned out that we all would teach just 2 lessons each- but each lesson was 90 minutes long. Dave do not even find this out until he thought his first lesson was over the teachers refused to leave. Typical.

Topics of the week have been:
Dave- How I spend my Holidays and Weekends
Meredith - Educational Pressure
Brock - US Government
Becky - Family

Kristina taught every day in the schools auditorium using the full facilities of a slide projector and lights and sound. The rest of us just had to use Dave's class room and I had to make do with my laptop resting on top of a chair on the table.

I taught about the Education in England. First I spoke about the 4 different stages of school ; primary, secondary, higher and further. Then I broke them all down and spoke about each in detail-what they entailed, how difficult they were and what exams the students are expected to take. After that I spoke for a long time about how students go about training as a Teacher and how foreigners can become teachers in England - many eyes lit up at this point, and I was bombarded with questions of "How easy is it for me to get a job in England, where Can I get a Job?" I then spoke about my Education and showed photos of my secondary school, university and college days. The lesson side lasted just over an hour and then I took questions on any topic for half an hour. Questions included "Do you like David Beckham" and "How much was your laptop" so I'm glad I gave a clearly thought provoking talk.

1 comment:

Will Towell said...

I hope you made reference to the legendary 'Law Boys' of Leeds during your talk about university...