Classroom Chatter

Tony

Kindergarten is a great place to learn Chinese.  I mean as a teacher, not as a student.  In Kindergarten, little children are learning to communicate with each other for the first time.  The simple meanings they struggle to convey are short and to the point.  For someone like myself, who’s got the ability to speak Chinese like a three year old, I usually feel like I fit right in.

Often their attention turns to me, the most animated object in the classroom.  I’ve learned how to talk about the size of my belly (肚子好大) and how fat I am (太肥了), how to describe the gray color of my hair (白頭髮) and the shiny bald spot on the top of my head (沒有頭髮).  But I struggle with being called bald (光頭) and I try to let my hair grow long to cover up the inevitable signs of aging (我不是光頭, 我有頭髮).  Nevertheless, little children find these strange characteristics fascinating and relish the excitement that comes from contemplating the way I look.

Teaching older students has given me access to bigger, less personal, phrases.  “Teacher is coming!” (老師來了) and “Is it class time?” (上課了嗎).  What has surprised me more than anything is the level of English conversation I’ve heard in and around my classrooms.

“Teacher, why do we have to go to school on Thursday?” Michael raised his hand and asked before I had time to call on him.

“Because we had a typhoon on Monday,” I replied.

He was silent for a moment as I went back to teaching.  Then he raised his hand again.

“Teacher, why did we have a typhoon on Monday?”

Wow, Socratic method, I thought.  I wonder how long he’ll follow this line of reasoning.

“Because, out in the ocean, we have hot air and cold air and…” I began, but was interrupted.  Tammy raised her hand and started speaking rapidly without my permission – a habit I hoped wouldn’t spread to the rest of the classroom.

“Teacher, teacher, I know.  I know!” she said and ran to the whiteboard.

Before I had time to stop her, she commenced with diagramming an outline of the ocean and the hot and cold air weather patterns, explaining to the class how typhoons worked.  She could have been a weather reporter on TV – she was that good.

By now the class was heading in a new direction, not the one I had intended, but I let it go just to see what would happen.  I’d witnessed this one time before while teaching Kindergarten.  I had just explained to the students that animals have tails and people don’t.  One boy raised his hand and told the class that his mom said we used to all be monkeys.  I felt like some of my students still were monkeys, to be facetious.  However, debating evolution vs. creation wasn’t a road I wanted to go down with a bunch of six year olds.

As Tammy wrapped up her speech on typhoons, I erased her diagram from the whiteboard and sent her back to her seat.  I resumed teaching, yet in the back of my mind I wondered whether or not Michael would ask the next logical question:  why do we have hot and cold air out in the ocean?  Fortunately, he never did and I got through the lesson on time that day. 

When I reflected on these conversations later, I was impressed that my students could understand everything so well, considering English is their second language.  Nothing was ever explained to them in Chinese.  Sometimes, although rarely, there’s a moment of “flow” in my classes when the students begin to comprehend things far greater than anything covered in the teacher’s book.  Those are the moments I wish could happen every day.