Hi, my name is Emily Xu or 徐一苇. I was part of the 9-member group of ABCs (American born Chinese) sent to Shennongjia, China, to teach. We taught at a boarding school for two weeks with a 5-day vacation in between.

I was part of the Culture & Art team. My team’s three topics were American culture, sports, and music/dance; I mainly taught American culture, Yujia taught music/dance, and Brandon taught sports. We were planning to teach art instead of music and dance, but we figured that the students would rather learn about music and dance instead.

The students we taught were in the seventh and eighth grade; they were only a bit younger than us. There would be around 50 students in each class, so it was usually pretty stuffy inside the classroom. Instead of whiteboards, the classrooms had chalkboards; I was not accustomed to using chalk, so I ended up breaking a lot of chalk.

At most, we would only teach 3 lessons per day, so we would have plenty of downtime. During downtime, we would usually chill in the conference room or play on the track. The school’s track was very nice. It had a track (of course), volleyball court, multiple basketball courts, a soccer field, monkey bars, and ping-pong tables scattered around.

Teaching

Each class period lasted 40 minutes long, but Yujia and I (we usually taught together) often started 5 minutes early so that each student to give a brief introduction of themselves. These introductions helped warm the class up so that they would be more comfortable and responsive for the remainder of the class.

The first class I taught (I taught alone that class), was utterly terrible, in my opinion. I was super awkward and I was just reading off of my powerpoint. It was really boring and it didn’t get the students involved. After this, I had to figure out how to make my presentation more interesting.

My teammate, Yujia, helped me to revise my whole powerpoint. We cut down on videos and came up with little activities that would get the class involved. These activities were usually spelling games. Instead of just reading off the powerpoint, we came up with questions to ask the class. These questions would usually lead to mini-lessons. For example, if we were on a Trump slide, we would tell the class that Trump is a Republican. Then, we would ask if anyone knew what the other major political party in America is. It was unlikely that the students knew what a “Democrat” was, so we would teach them the word “Democrat”.

We eventually created a game, “Which side is American?”. We would have two different halves of a slide, right or left, and one side would consist of something American and the other side would usually consist of something Chinese. It would look like this:

From the slide above, we were able to teach the word “crowded” (and we were not trying to make fun of China’s beaches).

After all of these revisions, the quality of the lesson increased by a tenfold. I can easily say that some of the classes we taught were a success. What made our lesson a success was that it was educational, interactive, and most importantly, fun. We weren’t teaching them with the purpose of educating them, but to make English fun to learn about. Looking back, my American culture lesson was basically an interactive vocabulary lesson.

As I mentioned earlier, we were originally planning to teach art instead of music and dance. Suddenly, one day, it struck to Yujia and me that our current lesson on art was boring. Since we’ve always wanted to teach music, we decided to teach music instead. Dance is often associated with music, so we decided to teach dance too. We spent about two days creating the music/dance lesson and a few days later, we taught it. We ended up teaching music/dance only twice, but both classes were super “lit”. 

The ELA team also taught music, but both teams planned accordingly so that no class would be taught two music lessons. 

Life Outside of the Classroom

When I first walked into the girl’s dormitory, I was surprised at how spacious and clean it was. Later, I realized that our dorm was slightly wider than the students’ dorms. Our dorm consisted of four bunk beds; the dorm could fit up to eight people. There were two squat toilets, three sinks, and a small mirror.

Our dorm was on the third floor, facing the classrooms. So when we first arrived, lots of students were standing on the third floor of the opposite building, staring at us. We waved at them and they waved back. I didn’t mind the staring, but we washing underwear and bras, so we ended up pulling down the curtain for privacy.

During our first few days at the school, many of the girls approached us to ask for our QQs and WeChats. A few of them even asked to come up to our room at night. The was one time where a girl brought a watermelon to our room for us to eat. Another time, Elizabeth took out some bracelet-making sets and started making bracelets with the girls.

Now, we didn’t only have interactions with girls. There were a few boys that came up to us and asked for our WeChats and a selfie. There were other times where we would walk past a group of boys and they would all chorus “Hello!” in their Chinese accents.

We were treated like celebrities. Students would come up to us and ask for our signatures. After teaching, we would be bombarded with signatures. I had signed notebooks, minuscule pieces of paper, covers of students’ workbooks, and arms. It was to the point where I would start to forget how to do my signature because I signed so many. I found this signature phenomenon very interesting because if for some reason a group of foreign teens visited and taught at my school, it would have never occurred to me to ask for their signatures.

One obstacle we faced was hygiene. We found that one way the students cleaned themselves was by hauling buckets of hot water to their dorm and rinsing their bodies in the bathroom. We also found out that there was a public shower. The school made time for us to use the showers, right before the students got out of their last class of the day. They gave us cards that activated hot water; each card brought us 10 minutes of hot water and unlimited amounts of cold water. At first, we were skeptical about how clean the showers were. However, we were pleasantly surprised when we first stepped into the shower room; the showers had a locker room and a separate room with rows of showers. It was clean and smelled nice.

The students had about 2 hours of free time between their last afternoon class and first evening class. During this period of time, we often went to the school’s track to play ping-pong, volleyball, basketball, and soccer with the students. A game of basketball was held between us Americans and the Chinese teachers. We lost. Another game of soccer was held between us and the school’s soccer team. We lost again. In the end, we paid no attention to the score; all that mattered was fun and the bonds built between these friendly scrimmages.

The night before we left, we went to the front of the cafeteria to meet and say goodbye to all the students. We gave out WeChats, signatures, hugs, and handshakes. In return, the students showered us with copious amounts of snacks, drinks, and handwritten notes. I found it touching how the students set aside enough time to write us personalized notes.

After the gathering, we stayed up until 12:00 to pack and reflect on the past few weeks. The next morning, we woke up and packed our final items. A few girls came by our dorm before we left; hugs were exchanged, and goodbyes were made. We soon headed to the front gate and met with the rest of the group and the school staff. The principal thanked us for coming and wished us safe travels. We shook hands, loaded up our rental bus, and were off on our way.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed this trip to Shennongjia. I want to thank all the students and staff members for accommodating and welcoming us to their school. From serving us watermelon to writing us notes, I really appreciated how thoughtful and welcoming the Chinese students were; it’s something that I can learn from.