Wong's Weblog

Me no speak Chinese??

Soooo you know how I said I was going to try to tutor for work while I was out in HK…well I finally did last week.  It took a couple of months after I applied because most kids were still in school so the tutoring center didn’t need extra teachers but summer session just began so it is pandemonium inside the center with kids everywhere.  The owner of the tutoring center called me the day before and asked me to show up and discuss and teach the next day so I thought hey, it doesn’t hurt to earn some extra cash.  Well I showed up at 11:00 AM the next morning to start helping as an assistant to one of the other teachers who was a young Eurasian college student that lives in HK.  First session went great.  We tag-teamed teaching 3 kids a lesson on words that end with the letters “an.”  It was a joyous time of teaching phonics and saying sentences such as “Emily cooked with a pan“, “Emily stayed out in the sun far too long and got a tan“, “Emily drank from a soda can” and so on and so forth.  Good times. Good times.

Second session started at 12:00 pm.  There were 8 kids so we split into 2 classrooms of 4.  I had 2 little girls and 2 little boys that were around 8-9 years old.  Their names were Gigi, Serina, Edison and Kevin.  Cute little kids I would have to say but would they stay that way…

Our lesson that day for them was based on reading comprehension and the topic was “The first day of school.”  Oh, the wonderful memories of the first day of school.  Heck I can remember my 1st day of school pretty vividly.  My mom dropping me off at school and me not wanting to get out of the car so I would pull on her hair so I could stay with her.  Ya, that first day of Senior year high school was rough, uhhh I meant kindergarten… Anyways, we read a story about these twin girls that were experiencing their first day of school and we talked about what they ate for breakfast and how they were late to school because of an accident and then finally the twist in the whole story was they switched backpacks accidentally when they got to school!! I love these crazy children’s stories with twists.

So, as I was teaching them they had confused looks on their face, then I thought oh yeah there was vocabulary on the front page and I skipped right over it.  Stupid me. So we went back to the 1st page and went over the vocabulary.  I explained words like accident by using 2 pencils and making them collide.  I said to them “this is an accident (took 2 pencils and smashed them into each other), Boom!!” It seemed like a great example at the time but unfortunately I was wrong, yet again… They started taking everything on the desk and made things go “Boom!!” Fantastic, I should get a star for my teaching capabilities.

We got to the word “term” and for the life of me, the most simple word in the world (not really) and I just was not getting through to them.  I tried to explain, “a term is a period of time, like right now boys and girls, you are on summer term, and when you go to school in September, that is your 1st term of school.” Right, that makes sense doesn’t it? Made sense to me! So as I kept on trying to explain it to them, I overheard one of the girls, Serina, speaking to Gigi in Cantonese saying “what is he talking about” and Gigi would reply “I have no idea.” Also, by this point, Edison was quite restless and put his head on the ground and then the girls kept on yelling at me to speak Chinese.  They kept saying in English, “we know you can speak, just talk to us in Chinese.”  Of course I was carefully instructed to say “What are you talking about, I’m from America, I can’t speak Chinese.” But of course we all know that’s a lie haha, oh how devious and tricky us adults are…

So my kids kept on getting restless and did not want to do any of the activities and Edison putting his head down did not help the situation because then Gigi started putting her head down on the table.  You may ask where Kevin was during this whole time, well he was the quiet one so we don’t talk about him.  The girls kept on talking in Cantonese and of course I understood so I would interrupt their conversations with what they were talking about in English but kids, they are the cutest things, they didn’t even pick up on me understanding their chinese, I was just so sneaky.

We got to the part where they were supposed to write about their 1st day of school.  Let’s just say they were not happy to have to write a paragraph now on their 1st day of school after answering questions about the twins from the story before.  They kept on raising their voices and I kept on trying to reason with them. I went as far as to tell them what to write exactly and still, barely a budge on their efforts.  I would then go on to explain with threats like, “Now Gigi, your parents are paying a lot of money for you to learn here.  You need to do the work or they won’t be very happy.”   So a tip to you future tutors, the threat of parents usually works on little kids.  Class ended, I graded each of them for the day (I was a bit too gracious on their scores, I’m way too nice) and we said our good-byes.

After class, I discussed the schedule of when I would work with the tutor center’s owner (I forgot to mention that at the time I was and currently still am full time volunteering on Mondays thru Thursdays at my church).   She said, “I’m going to need you on Tuesday and Thursday from Noon to 1:00 PM.”  So I quickly thought to myself, “hmm, 2 hours a week right in the middle of my day” and I responded with a “No, thank you very much.” And that my friends, concludes my illustrious career as a childern’s english teacher.