The First Week

你们好!
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The first week is done and on the record. I thought it went pretty successful. During the winter break, my students have been in their hometowns for 2 straight months with very little English-language exposure, so the mission of Week 1 was to "pull them" (Insert image of me pulling an invisible rope in front of the room) back to the world of English I try to create during our 90 minutes together each week. The below image is our theme this semester - the students fired off their interpretations! What do you think our goals are this Spring? If you read this blog regularly, you already know that there are two pinnacle skills I feel obligated to facilitate for my Chinese university students (taken from my Spring 2009 Syllabus):

• Creativity – See the world around you in new and innovative ways. Use what you know and have and invent and transform! Be unique and original! Search and find life in everything！Don't be afraid to be different! It might be uncomfortable at first...maybe seem foolish - But it's not foolish at all! It's invention!
• Critical Thinking – The empowerment of inquiry, or the power a person feels when he or she has the ability to reflect and search for the Truth ("capital 'T'"). How do I feel about something? Why do I feel this way? How and why do others feel differently than me?

Both of these skills are neglected by the Chinese Education System and students are almost never exposed to any classroom pedagogy that utilizes either. Since the students have a dreaded country-wide exam (TEM-4) next month, I've decided to focus most of the first 6 weeks around the first skill - creativity - and have them a) write poetry and b) perform various learning techniques that use a discipline very close to my heart: "Dramatic Pedagogy" or "Enactment". Enactment is, quite simply, creating situations in which we "imagine to learn" (Wilhelm and Edmiston, 1998). Let's take a look at two popular first class activities from this past week.

The Stick:

"What is this? A stick, yes. But tell me more! What do you see? Bamboo, yes, it is bamboo. But do you think it could be something more than just a bamboo stick? Let's look at it for 5 seconds. What could this stick be? Create! Create Create!"

"Yes! A javelin! Yes! A flute! A Harry Potter broomstick! A calligraphy brush! A stick of sugar cane...Delicious! A pole vault! A telescope! Gimme more!"

The Paper Platform:

"Okay, get into groups of 5 people. Here is your platform. Your mission is to see how many people from your group you can get off the cement ground and onto the piece of paper in front of you. Start slow! 1 at a time! Ready...Go!"

Both activities produced some interesting answers and performances. After both, the students understood or began to understand why both are relative in the classroom and most importantly, in their lives as active learners and planners. They began to recognize each other's strengths (girls with high-heels had an advantage on the platform; boys with muscles could carry each other/smaller girls) and weaknesses (trying to have everyone start on the platform and then try to balance) and compared this collective cooperation activity with the previous "Stick" activity which dealt with individualized creative expression. All in all, the students did a great job...

The very lovely Mother Razem sent me a box of Chinese fortune cookies over Spring Festival (Chinese restaurants in China don't give customers fortune cookies after the meal, much to the sadness of first day tourists in China, and a custom completely unknown to my students) so I handed these treats out and asked them to read each other their "fortunes". Some did not understand their pieces of wisdom so I tried my best to explain. May favorite fortune of the week:
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"All the water in the world can't sink a ship unless it gets inside"

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"Who is the ship? What is the water?" A lesson everyone, indiscriminate of country or culture, can learn from...

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I love and miss you all,

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Phil

蓝麦飞