Monday, November 13, 2017

I'll admit it, I make mistakes.


We all make mistakes, this is a surprise to no one. We all make language mistakes. Again, this shouldn't be a surprise. One of my tenth graders has created a joke out of my asking Siri. I didn't realize at first just how often I ask Siri to spell a word. Now, anytime I wonder about the spelling of a word one of my students goes, "Hey Siri, how do you spell..."
When I was an exchange student in Germany (and thus learning German) I thought the word for tired (müde) was pronounced just like the word for brother (brüder). As you can probably guess from looking at these words, that simply isn't true. The thing is when you learn a foreign language, especially when you learn it from immersion rather than a classroom setting, you often don't hear the words/sounds quite right.
Other times you fall into the trap of false cognates. In German the word information is Information (although note, it is pronounced a little bit differently). Computer is Computer, and meter is meter (although German nouns do have gender and I realize I'm leaving that part out - on purpose). Additionally, you have words that are very similar like mother in German is Mutter and book is Buch.   But then there are the false cognates - words that look similar or even sound similar, but have rather different meanings. One of my favorite of these is the verb putzen. It sounds a lot like put, but the meaning isn't the least bit similar. One of my fellow exchange students, Laura, told us a story about her misuse of the word putzen. Because she thought it meant put she used it all the time. She would tell her host family she was going to putzen the letter in the mailbox. Now this story gets really funny when I tell you that putzen actually means to clean! After getting over her embarrassment, Laura was able to laugh at this and even shared the story with myself and some of her other foreign exchange student friends (by the way, I don't usually use real names, but I haven't seen Laura in over 20 years and if by some chance you're reading this and your that Laura, please contact me).
Like Laura, I have been forced to accept that fact that no matter how hard I try I will always make mistakes. Sometimes they are grammar mistakes (I make those in English too), sometimes they are mistakes in word choices (now that I think about it, I sometimes make those in English too) and sometimes they're mistakes in writing (I mean spelling, but since I'm about the speak about Chinese which doesn't have an alphabet I chose the word writing).
Here's a screen shot of me typing a Chinese character
here within this blog. If you click on the little drop down
menu on the right, more choices will appear. When you click
anywhere on a new row the numbers will be assigned to
the characters in that row. You select a character by
hitting the number associated with that character.
There are different ways to have the characters sort,
but I usually leave mine sorted by frequency.
As I've mentioned in my last post, I teach a seventh grade science class that didn't go well until I started teaching it bilingually. While this is useful for the students it results in a lot of mistakes because, well let's face it Chinese is a tough language! Today, I gave my students a quiz on organs of the human body. On this quiz, I had typed the Chinese name of the organ and the students had to write the English name. I can type Chinese a lot better than I can write because when I type, I type in pinyin (the romanization of Chinese characters used on the mainland) and pick the character from a list that pops up on my screen. Using this method I only have to be able to recognize the character to type it. One of the words on the quiz was 肾 which means kidneys. Unfortunately, I accidentally chose 神 which means God. Two of the students, knew what I meant (the pronunciation of these characters only varies in the tone) and simply corrected my character. The other students started laughing and putting their hands together and pretending they were praying. The teaching assistant went around the room, correcting their papers and it was all good.
The other day, my mistake was a little funnier. We were reviewing the English names of the organs and I was giving the students the Chinese name and having them
say the English name. Unfortunately instead of saying heart (心xin - first tone), I accidentally said sex ( 性 xing - fourth tone). Now in reality the word for sex, as in how the students took it is 性爱 (xing ai), what I said more like gender, but these are 7th grade boys. They laughed uproariously and that day I didn't have a TA in the room to help me (actually I often don't). Thankfully one of the kids said enough for me to figure out what I might have said. After class, I asked one of my Chinese coworkers some questions in relation to what I might have accidentally said and he turned all red, but didn't answer. Thankfully, my dictionary doesn't get nervous about telling me what words mean.
When I first started teaching this class I felt like it was the bane of my existence. After all, it's not only middle school (not my favorite grade to teach), but it's also life science (my least favorite science) and the kids don't really speak English. Nonetheless, the class has really grown on me. They are still middle schoolers, but they really get into the videos I show them and they bring a unique energy that is actually a lot of fun. Then there are the decidedly middle school actions. For example I introduced the concept of the larynx in class today and wrote the Chinese word on the board. The first character in the Chinese word for larynx ( pronounced yan) sounds the same as to smoke. One of the students got up and jokingly said I had the wrong character and changed it to the character to smoke - I guessed that was the character he wrote because I could recognize the part of the character that means fire (and then the TA confirmed it). A couple of times in class I have introduced the word esophagus (食管 -shi guan) which is pronounced almost the same as the second and third characters in embassy (大使馆 -da shi guan). The shi in esophagus is second tone while in embassy it's third tone (if you don't know anything about Chinese tones second tone is a rising tone and third tone is a falling then rising tone). When that one came up there was no TA in the room, so I was pretty happy that I recognized what the kid was conveying.
While, I do make a lot of mistakes I think it is good. You learn more from your mistakes than you do when you get things wrong. Thus, I'm learning a lot of Chinese (of course not only from my mistakes, but also from preparing for class). I'm also modeling for the students. I need these students to be willing to make mistakes, especially in their language learning. If they aren't willing to try they won't improve. Thus, since I keep making mistakes I keep modeling the fact that its okay to make mistakes and that you need to just keep on trying. And isn't that a lesson that extends well beyond language learning?

Friday, November 3, 2017

He laughed so hard his belly ached.

My school is set-up very much in a Chinese style. Even though we more or less follow an American curriculum, the students attend all of their classes together as a class, much like it is in an American elementary school, except that the different subjects are taught by different teachers. Also, the students stay in one classroom and the teachers come in to teach the students. Because our school is very small (less than 50 students spread out over grades 7-11 - no 12th grade because the students all of to our sister school in Virginia for 12th grade) there is only one class per grade and those grades can be as small as 4 students (8th grade). The largest grade is 10th grade (the start of high school in China). Our 10th grade class has 15 students which is our maximum for any grade.
I teach 10th grade chemistry and calculus I (we call it calculus I because its really the AP curriculum taught over 2 years) and also 7th grade life science.
One of the questions people commonly ask me is, "do you teach in English or in Chinese." Usually, the answer is in English. My 10th graders can more or less handle the English (that's not to say it isn't really difficult nor that I don't spend a lot of time helping them understand what things mean), but my 7th graders are an entirely different story! We started the school year with four 7th graders. Of these four one spoke pretty good English, one spoke decent English and two spoke no English. We then moved a student down from 8th grade because his English was sufficient to handle to 8th grade and we added a 6th grader who wants to attend our school, but joined a year early (we start at grade 7) to learn English before he needs the year to count (in other words he has been planning to repeat the 7th grade next year from the time he began). This makes trying to teach a 7th grade American curriculum very challenging. Most of the material we are learning is new for the students (meaning they've never learned it in Chinese either) and all but one of them really cannot learn the material from English. I have two assistants who take turns attending the class, but they tend to not know the science words in English (and often not in Chinese either) and so this makes life very interesting.
As a result, I end up teaching my 7th grade class bilingually (or at least to the best of my ability). I prepare vocabulary charts in which I give them the English word and the Chinese word (I check with a coworker to make sure I got the right word from the dictionary. He often has to do a Baidu search to confirm the word because it has been a long time since he's taken Biology). Sometimes I included the pronunciation of the Chinese word. This is for me because during class I have to use the Chinese words repeatedly and sometimes in the beginning I cannot remember the pronunciation. We then go through the material using videos, powerpoint, models and other visual aids. I often ask my questions in English and then repeat them in Chinese. If there is an important point that I cannot say in Chinese, I ask the TA to translate. One of the TAs will usually do so (she also gives me individual words if I need them), the other usually will not (I don't think he can). Some of the students will try to ask their questions in English. Some of them really don't have the ability to ask the question in English. The other day, I had a student who had a long question. He spoke on and on and on in Chinese for about two minutes before I stopped him. I said, "I can't follow all of that." He looked at the TA and replied, "but she can translate." I told him, "yes, but she can't remember so much to translate all of that. Start at the beginning and go slowly." He started at the beginning and I could understand the first sentence completely. Then he kept going and the TA started having trouble translating, but between the two of us I got the main idea. As we progress through a topic the students learn more and more of the English words and the class moves from almost entirely in Chinese to maybe 60-70% in English. Unfortunately, I don't think it ever gets beyond 70% English. This has resulted in my Chinese definitely improving, and sometimes with some of the strangest words (my Chinese vocabulary now includes the names of most organs in the body, cells, blood, mitosis, meiosis, the stages of those processes and even odd words like dialysis. Unfortunately, while I can describe the entire process of cell division in Chinese, I cannot tell you I'm sad or frustrated). One day recently, one of my students said (in English), "Miss Cannon your Chinese has upgraded."
One of the funniest moments occurred yesterday. The day before yesterday I had given the students a new vocabulary sheet. This one was on major organs in the body. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to include the stomach. Therefore, I wrote the word stomach (in English) on the board and told the students to add the word stomach in both English and Chinese to their sheet (I told them this in Chinese). One of my students then asked me, (in Chinese) "How do you write stomach?" I replied (in Chinese), "the English or Chinese word?" "The Chinese word." I just looked at him. Another student explained to him how to write the word. A third student then asked me, (in Chinese) "teacher, how do you write stomach in Chinese?" I looked at him (all of the students are male) and said, "You're asking me how to write stomach in Chinese? Me? I'm an American. You think I know how to write it?" (all of this was also said in Chinese). I then proceed to look up the character in my dictionary and showed it to him before I wrote the Chinese word for stomach on the board. A fourth student was laughing and laughing and laughing. Next thing I know he tells me (also in Chinese), "Ms. Cannon I laughed so hard my belly aches. The Chinese student needed the foreigner to tell him how to write a Chinese word!"

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Halloween Chinese style

A few of our students trick-or-treating. Some
of them really dressed up, but I didn't think
to take pictures.
The entrance to the school. Notice that the pumpkins are
quite large, are the traditional jack-o-lantern
shape and are orange (or at least mostly). None of
these are common things in China.



















I'm sure it surprises no one to hear that Halloween is not a traditional Chinese holiday. Back when I lived in Inner Mongolia (2002-2005) basically no one in China had ever heard of Halloween. My first year in Baotou (the city I lived in in Inner Mongolia) I taught a really cool class that included afternoon culture activities. That year we had a big Halloween party where we not only carved jack-o-lanterns, but made our own piñata (I didn't have anywhere to hang it from though so I stood on a chair and held it while my blindfolded students swung at it with a plastic bat). One funny thing I remember is I instructed my students to all bring in a pumpkin, preferably orange (traditionally most pumpkins here are green) to carve jack-o-lanterns. That student came to class laughing because when he was shopping for pumpkins he was looking for the biggest one he could find (they are traditionally quite small) and the seller told him, "but the smaller pumpkins taste better." He told us he replied, "but I'm not going to eat the pumpkin, I'm going to play with it!"

Fast forward to 2017 and its an entirely different story. Two weeks ago I was shopping
Some of us dressed up more than others.
in a large chain store (as opposed to an import store) and they had a whole section of Halloween decorations, costumes and more. At my current school the students all live on campus as do all over the foreign teachers, except me. The students asked some of the teachers if they could do trick-or-treating at the teacher's apartments. The teachers agreed and we all went and bought candy (I teamed up with someone else and we each gave candy out from her apartment). Then in the evening the student council threw a Halloween party. This Halloween party included a haunted house (where I managed to scare the kids trying to scare me instead of the other way around), lots of face painting, fake blood, costumes and or course candy. A couple of the biggest surprises for me were the fact spiderwebs and the large jack-o-lantern size pumpkins (they weren't carved though). It sure was a very different story from 15 years ago when my students only knew what I taught them about Halloween. Enjoy a sampling of the photos from Halloween.


I don't know who procured the Scream masks, but
there were several of them. This is me with one of my 7th
grade students.