Expectations at 4:04 AM

Dear Blog Readers,

This blog post may not be for you if you have sensitive eyes or ears, I'm warning you there is short quote that contains mild foul language in this blogentry . The next entries you won't have worry about that, but I have to let you know. I never want someone to be mad that they read this blog.

With that out of the way I want to write about expectations. 
I've been struggling a lot with teaching lately. Here are the reasons why teaching English here (China) is difficult
1. My classes have at least 60 kids, sometimes upwards of 70 or 80.
2. I can't give my students a grade.
3. Some of my kids won't try becuase they don't understand any English
4. Kids think I'll be easier on them then their normal teachers, so often they'll do things the wouldn't normally do like
   A. Listen to headphones in class
   B. Read News in Chinese on their phones
   C. Play video games on phones or dictionaries in class

It's been really hard some days to do anything. Sometimes class goes really well, but often, kids have a bad day, or kids are trying to get away with stuff they know they shouldn't do. The other foreign teacher at my school actually caught a kid smoking in a closet during her class a few weeks ago.

So I've been thinking a lot about it and talking a lot about it. Cause it can be pretty frustrating some days. Especially since a lot of my classes were changed lately and I have different kids who are trying to push the limits.

Three things came together to help me understand I'm not the worst teacher in the world. They are listed as follows:

1. Another teacher who helps us out a lot (Luke Liu, a Chines guy with really good English, and a great friend) said that I have to accept the fact that some kids aren't going to listen. He said we act like communists as teachers (hear this out), we teach like every child is the same even though we know in our hearts that they're all at different levels. We try to make a lesson that will help every child improve, which is impossible since every child is in a different place, but we still try. However, to think that you can get every child to choose to learn every class is not going to happen. Kids have their agency. It made me feel a lot better. I always thought the kids were perfect for their Chinese teachers, but I realized that even the super strict mean chinese teachers still have kids who are oblivious or who are causing commotion.

2. I was talking to my sister last night. I realize that even though I can't see everything inside her life and all the things she struggles with, she's totally my hero. I've always thought she did way more than she gave herself credit for. I was telling her about how it's hard to motivate my self to learn Chinese when there's no due date and I can't really measure my progress, and she totally understood. She made it sound like her whole life was like that with all the things she knew she should do, but I look at her life and I see a successful person who is doing everything she knows how. She's totally one of the hero's of my life. If I ended up in a situation close to where she's at right now, I would consider my life a success.
All in all, I realized that the discrepancy between how I looked at her life and how she looked at her life was based on expectations. All she could see was the things she hadn't done that she had expected herself to do that day, and all I can see are the things that she's been working on for years that are totally awesome. It made me feel better because in conjunction with that I realized that for the classes I teach, I used to have to speak slow, and now I don't. Even though my classes act really bad sometimes and I'm frustrated with them, technically I've done a good job since they understand way more english than they did before.

3. Today I was reminded of a close friend of mine. A girl who has had her share of struggles in life, like the rest of us. I first met her in one of my student wards at BYU where she was the relief society president. Really an amazing girl. Anyways, one day she was having an especially hard time with all the things that she was expected to do. It was a little too much and I'm sure she felt a little like garbage because she knew she couldn't get it all done. She called her dad and told her a bit about how she was feeling and how hard things had been for her and he gave her this advice.
"honey, I want you to go outside, k?" (Father)
"Um, ok" (Daughter)
"You outside?" (Father)
"Yeah" (Daughter)
"ok, I want you to yell at the top of your lungs, 'Damn you society and to hell with your expectations'" (Father)
"Really?" (Daughter)
"Really" (Father)
"Now?" (Daughter)
"Now" (Father)
(Yelling) (Daughter)
"Good job Honey, you feel any better?" (Father)

That story always made me laugh a lot.  And I think he's right. I wouldn't word it that way, but I think we get caught up in what we think we should do and we don't give ourselves enough credit, so we're bogged down by bad emotions cause we never feel like we're doing good enough. But we are doing good enough. It may not be everything we hoped for, but we're doing our best, and I think when we can look back on our best we'll see that great improvement was made and that we're happy with our effort.

With that in mind, I went to class today ready to have fun. Not to have all of my kids behaving perfectly.
I went with this hypothesis:
Even if we're playing games, we're still practicing English, and therefore still improving.
So even though a straight class of games is not common in high school, for my classes, it's not a bad thing, since I teach spoken English, and if we're speaking, we're practicing.

So, here was my class today.
Part 1 - I rolled up some trash paper and we threw it around the room. Who ever it landed on had to answer a 'favorite' question. ie "What is your favorite color?" or subject, or basketball player. We did that for about 15 minutes and it was super fun. I asked the questions to the students if they got the paper. At one point one of my students threw the paper at me. And I asked him who he was trying to hit. He said me! Then he asked me who my favorite girl was, so I said my mother. They didn't like the cop out, but the game was a hit, and almost everyone participated.

Part 2 - I went through about 8 vocabulary words that had to do with Christmas. I think you'll see how they fit together.
Santa
Beard
Gift
Coal (naught or nice right?)
sleigh
reindeer
chimney
I explained each one and how it fit together with Christmas and made sure they all knew how to say each word, and what the meaning was.
This lasted about 10-20 minutes

Part 3 - I erased the words and we played a game where after I divided the class into teams, I called on random kids and made them spell out words that I called.
This part lasted anywhere from 5-20 minutes depending on how much of class was left.

Overall, the lesson went well in every class. They heard english, they spoke english, and we rejoiced. There were a few kids who weren't paying attention, but when I let it go, I felt better. I would love to be able to have every kids undivided attention, but as long as there's agency that's not going to happen. But I'm happy to teach the kids that want to learn and to continue to learn how to be a better teacher to reach the kids that aren't as interested.

Anyways, in conclusion, I think expectations for how you want to perform are good. But they have to be reasonable. I think if they are, they'll bring happiness as we strive to be better, I think if they're not we'll end up beating ourselves up a lot for things that we may have actually done a good job on. So, I will continue to refine my expectations of what I want to achieve with my classes. I can't make everyone fluent, but even up to now my students have made leaps and bounds in their abilities. I think I'm doing alright.