Back to the Tibetan School in Ganzi

I’d enjoyed my time at the school so much that I ask Zhuoma if we can return the following morning. We get the go ahead and are given two hours in which we can teach several classes.

The morning’s Tibetan class (with Gregor and Elyse sitting in the front row).

Rather than have the same conversations with the students as we did the previous night, I decide to give the students a lesson in some basic English: nouns, verbs and adjectives.

After coming up with adequate definitions for the terms (which the students copy into their notebooks). I write several sentences on the board in which the students have to pick the nouns, verbs and adjectives. After the class finish the task, I have them come up with some sentences which the rest of the class need to work on.

Inevitably, when one of the students raise their hands to offer a sentence, they ask me to sing a song. Since we have plenty of time in the lesson, I have them work on a few more sentences first. Towards the end of the class, we follow the same routine as the previous night. First the students sing a Tibetan song, then I enlist the help of Gregor and Elyse to teach the students “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.”

After the class finishes, we go outside to watch the flag raising ceremony while the students sing the Chinese national anthem. The director asks me to examine one of the students English. I ask that we do it away from the other students as it' may be difficult for the girl to perform in front of her peers. He says it’s no problem, so we have a short conversation in front of the other students. I tell him that the girl’s English is quite good and should be adequate for the college entrance examination which pleases the director. He asks me to test the other students and I suggest we break them up into three groups since there are three of us and each of us take a small group and talk to them.

After taking a group, we sit in a circle, introduce ourselves, talk about our age, where we’re from and how many people in our family. I then have the students talk about their favourite music, TV shows and sports. After an hour long lesson, I teach the students a game we played back in Australia, by the name of bullrush.

The playground where the students and I play bullrush, something that wouldn’t be allowed in Australia (since it could hurt the precious children).

After the lesson ends, the group I have goes to another class and I’m given a new group of students. This new group knows less English than the first group and we have much difficulty repeating the introduction exercise that I did with the first group. The second exercise we do involves the students saying: “I think I am” <insert adjective>, I think he/she (person to their left) is <adjective>”. Many of the students struggle with the exercise, so instead we do some vocabulary building exercises to learn words to describe people, colours and animals.

The class ends an hour later, and the students break for lunch. We say goodbye to the students, give them our emails if they want to practice their English with us and go to have lunch with Zhuoma. All in all, a very successful couple of lessons.

Turns out teaching isn’t all that difficult ;)