Monday saw the beginning of a two week orientation program and primary school training where we were split off in to our separate teaching groups of primary, secondary and post secondary. The training was exhausting but it gave us a pretty comprehensive insight in to the type of things we will be expected to do during the course of our year on the program.The insight in to teaching, the information and the resources given to us, by Chatteris during these two weeks were invaluable and, after each day, I felt that each day I had acquired so many more tools in order to get these children to have fun and speak English whilst still feeling there is so much more to know and still not yet ready to go out on our own. However, there is so much space for creativity, initiative, and your own unique ideas whilst teaching that it seems to almost require you to not just deliver lessons but almost give something of yourself to it, in order to get the most back, whilst also be willing to constantly learn and improve and open minded to learn how other – quite the challenge but one which I am sure every teacher been through to some extent.
Since every lesson we teach needs to be begun with a ‘warm up or energiser’, our orientation was largely taken up by being taught, and teaching others a huge amount of childrens games and songs, and had us all running around, crouching, jumping, shouting, dancing, singing and acting so much that I felt as though I was about 7 years old again myself! - in fact I don’t think I even played this many when I was a child. The music and drama day saw us in wigs, sunglasses and capes, when we performed an extra special rendition of the three little pigs for a P3 class before designing in groups our own ‘harry potter the handsome pig!’.
We did in fact do some work! The rest of the days were spent designing, planning and teaching a lesson with a partner along different themes and also participating in others lessons. We finished the day exhausted, having given so much energy in to our lessons and wilting from the heat and humidity of the mid afternoon!
The children themselves are wonderful. They are very sweet, extremely polite and on the whole very well behaved. They all give themselves English names and so you get some slightly strange names, many like betty, conny, candy, sandy, cherry, and then thoers I have heard like bread, and messy. Apparantly, it is quite common to change your name, which people do a lot depending on films they had seen or celebrities they admire! They also work extremely hard and are under quite a lot of pressure to perform well and get 100%. They stand up when answering questions and are almost too receptive to signals telling them to be quiet. They are also quite shy and lacking in confidence to speak in front of the class and although they have many English lessons a week, they are very unwilling to speak it and lack the tools to speak it socially and conversationally., not wanting to get it wrong, which is obviously where organisations like Chatteris step in. However, in so many ways, it reminded me of the I guess, near universal feeling of learning a foreign language where you do not want to speak if you are not completely sure, in case you are wrong or you get the accent or pronunciation wrong. I remember sitting in many a French conversation lesson and trying to avoid eye contact with the language assistant so I did not have to say anything or not wanting to answer the questions!
In the middle of our training, all of us joined together to put on an English funfair for all the children we had been working with. Most of us will have to organise whole school English events and funfairs are a popular option so it was very useful albeit quite daunting, to see the time, energy and resources that went in to the setting up and the smooth running of the event! Testament to this was the fact that Hannah, the girl organising the whole thing, walked round with a headset on the whole time! It was quite a feat to organise the whole thing, as the covered playground was transformed in to rows of games and stalls, which we had to man as well as looking after our assigned group. Taylor and I ran the shooting game and, as you can guess, we were swarmed with boys of all ages, who were desperate to get their hands on the different sizes of plastic guns and shoot the rubber pellets at the pictures of English words. They were supposed to answer a question to which the answer was a picture to shoot at although the spoken English to shooting ratio could have been better! At least they had fun! We frequently had to herd them back as they crowded practically on top of the pictures to shoot them. A surprising number of girls, came to play although were far more sensible and nearly always refused the larger guns, wanting only to use the smaller pistol, the opposite to the boys!
That evening., we all went out to celebrate in LKF, at central on the Island where I was lucky enough to see a friend from home whose family lives out here, who was out celebrating her birthday which made my night extra lovely!
After having listened to western music and danced, we came back in a taxi about 3am, and as we came out from under the cross harbour tunnel, we drove through this road full to the brim of offloaded fruit especially oranges, boxes and boxes were piled all the way along the road obviously ready to be distributed across Kowloon.
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