Visiting SSTers in Guang'an

On October 27 we visited the SSTers who teach at Friendship Middle School in Guang’an. Friendship is an institution with a strong reputation for academics. The school is also well funded, as evinced by the touch screen smart boards in every classroom. The school has two campuses, one for lower middle school (grades 7-9) and one for upper middle school (grades 10-12). The campuses are a thirty minute (brisk) walk apart. Angeliky and Vince teach at both campuses, while the other four SSTers teach only on the upper middle school campus. Despite having two campuses, the school still faces classroom space constraints and so evening classes are a regular part of the school schedule. A large chunk of the SST teaching blocks are in the evenings, although they also have some morning and afternoon classes. A few Saturday review classes round out the schedules of some teaching pairs.

No one was scheduled to teach on this Monday morning, so we arranged to arrive and meet the group at 10 AM at one of their favorite meeting spots – the Haiti Coffee Shop, just across the street from the upper middle school campus gate. Why, exactly, the place is named for the Caribbean nation is unclear. Neither the menu nor the décor seem connected. But the coffee is good (important for Angeliky!) and they also serve tea, bubble tea, milk tea, and hot chocolate. We got drinks and sat and talked for about two hours, catching up on what they have been doing, what the teaching situation is like, host family life here, how Guang’an compares with Nanchong, and so on. Then we went to lunch, continued our conversations. In the early afternoon we found a tea house (actually a set of tables and chairs under awnings) by the river, where we had one-on-one meetings with each SSTer to talk further about how things were going.

Later in the afternoon we were able to sit in classes taught by Angeliky and Vince and by Amanda and Sam. (We’ll catch Lee and Reuben next week when we return to Guang’an.) We were especially impressed with the high level of oral English proficiency among the seventh graders Vince and Angeliky had on this day (a class of 76 students). They reviewed vocabulary from the textbook, and then reviewed family relationship terms (such as grandmother, uncle, niece, cousin) and occupation titles (such as nurse, manager, bus driver, policeman). After each review, the students wrote short paragraphs using the new words, while Vince and Angeliky circulated and answered individual questions. Then students volunteered to stand and read their sentences aloud.

At 4:10 pm Amanda and Sam had a class of 10th graders. They taught one of a number of lessons they have developed about U.S. holidays. Today they focused on Thanksgiving. Their students practiced a dialogue to review vocabulary and pronunciation, and also played a game to test comprehension of the Thanksgiving vocabulary they had learned (competing to see who could write the correct answer to a question most quickly on the board). In other classes Amanda and Sam have been using games of Pictionary and charades as ways to bring variety to vocabulary drills in class. Sam and Amanda’s afternoon teaching take them to different classes every day, while their evening teaching is with the same class sections each week, allowing them to build relationships with the students.