The kids just cannot remember my name. But they call me in such a cute way, I can't be mad at them at all.
Teaching children (and teenagers!) how to speak English is not always easy, especially when their mother tongue is Chinese (not to mention the fact I am no native speaker either and my mother tongue is Slovakian). Sometimes after two hours of teaching I am covered in sweat not only because outside it is forty degrees in shadow and AC in the classroom stopped working a long long time ago.
Suddenly I am on the other side of teacher-student relationship, I am the one who demands from the students to answer my questions in a whole sentence and I want them to tell me their opinions on boring topics. It feels so different.
One of my kids really likes to talk to me in Chinese, even though I beg him thousand times to speak English. Sometimes, when I am too tired to quarrel with him, I just talk to him in Slovak language, and only then he stops talking and looks at me quite desperately.
But most of the children can create a sentence or two in English, the only problem is that they do not want to. I have been told that it is normal in China to have a language class where seventy kids just write down something teacher writes on the blackboard. Maybe that is the reason why they are so unwilling to talk sometimes.
I learned one thing by my teaching experience as well: I do not have the feeling that all Chinese kids look the same any more. Well, at the beginning I thought I would be completely lost while trying to remember their names and I wished they never changed their clothes, but now, one thing is for sure – each and every one of my kids is different from the others.
And one last observation: my Chinese friends do not think they have slanted eyes. They didn't believe us, that this is what most European people think about their eyes. Even better! They think that my eyes are slanted. Well, I guess there are some cultural differences in perception of reality between Europe and Asia.
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