A Portrait of the Teacher by a Young Student
14 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Teaching Tags: Classes, Obama, Students
A student from my underground literature class wrote an article about her experience with my teaching method. I had been helping the student develop her writing skills so that she could perform well on the GREs as her dream is to go to graduate school on edge of the prairie in Garrison Keillor Country — a place I had fond memories of from a journey I took in a former life. What follows is an article she wrote about my class for a Minneapolis/St. Paul based e-zine called China Insight.
In the article, she recalls the first day I introduced myself to the class. Her perspective can be compared with mine as I had written about it too in the post “Back to School.”
What follows is an excerpt from her article:
Back to School: Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom!
12 Sep 2009 2 Comments
in Teaching Tags: cell phones, humor, journey, Literature, Louis Lowry, Obama, poetry, syllabus, Teaching, The Alchemist, The Congo, The Giver, The Hobbit, Thoreau, Tolkien, Vachal Lindsay, Walt Whitman
They were a tough crowd. I introduced my first two literature classes to my concept of learning as a journey. At first their faces were impenetrable masks. Then I told them, “Even in America we know about Chair Mao’s famous Long March, and the founding of the People’s Republic of China.” Their faces lit up with pride. That’s when I knew my students understood me. “So this is an honor for me to be here on the China’s 60th anniversary, and be your guide on another journey. And it is an honor to be part of your education in the beginning of the Chinese Century. Of course, this journey will not be as hard as the Long March, but it will challenge you nonetheless.”
It was the first day of a two-semester class on American and British literature for junior English majors attending Xiangnan University in the city of Chenzhou in southern Hunan province. In the summer months prior to my arrival, I had known that I would be teaching literature, and that I would have the freedom to create my own curriculum. I was told that there was a text book and that the students were acquainted with some English literature such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Earnest Hemingway. Furthermore, I was told that I should feel free to bring my own books from American because the government-issue textbook was, “Maybe not so good.”
