One of the main reasons I’m even living in China is to improve my Chinese. While I speak more fluently than I did a few months ago, and some of the rust has come off, I find that I’m really not improving much, and it’s time to take things a bit more seriously.

That left me with three options. I could step up my studying on my own time, enroll in a school program, or find a tutor. I’ve already proven myself to be fairly lazy, and my work schedule makes attending any kind of school more or less impossible. Chinese tutors, though, are plentiful and inexpensive, so that’s the road I’ll be taking.

The problem with that is that unless you get really lucky and find a great one, you still need to more or less design your own course of study. Choosing a textbook is at least partially your decision, as is exactly what you study and how the tutoring sessions work. That affords a lot of customization, but it does mean you have to be extra careful you’re not wasting your time, too.

The first step, as I see it, is choosing a textbook. It’s tough to know exactly what fits with your level; I’m making my judgement based primarily on vocabulary. But even then, you need to figure out how the sessions will run. Will you read the textbook aloud? Practice the vocab/grammar? Prepare the text beforehand and then discuss it together/get quizzed on it by the tutor? It depends on your goals, I guess, my hope is to improve my active vocabulary (i.e., the vocabulary I know well enough to use myself when speaking) significantly, so I’m planning to prepare each lesson beforehand, and spend the tutoring session discussing questions I have with the grammar, being quizzed on the content, and discussing related issues more freely to practice my speaking and listening.

Once a week, I plan to dedicate a tutoring session to pure pronunciation for the first half, and pure conversation for the second half. I’ll read from simple texts and have my tutor correct any pronunciation mistakes; then we’ll discuss whatever topic I’ve prepared for the day and he will help me express anything I’m not sure how to say.

My current plan is to have about 4 hours/week, which will cost me 100RMB/week. I’m hoping the expense will keep me on the ball enough to actually work outside of the tutoring sessions. My school also offers two hours of free lessons every week, which I’ll probably dedicate to more relaxed, informal study. I’ve got a textbook here called Chinese Idiomatic Phrases for Foreign Students, I think I may do some lessons from that or just discuss whatever’s in the news recently.

The saga of my obnoxious roommate reached a new level today. During the break in one of the classes, I was in the teachers’ office talking to a colleague, and my roommate was sitting in the corner on the computer. My colleague and I were having a tongue-in-cheek conversation about how frustrating student apathy can be, when he suddenly blurted in with his opinion: if we have “that attitude” about our students, then we “aren’t cut out to be teachers.”

Even though this was mainly addressed at me, my colleague tried to point out that we were joking around, and that venting our frustrations outside of class helps keep us from taking them out on the students when we are in class. Not good enough, apparently if you ever have a negative thought about your students; if you’re ever frustrated they haven’t prepared properly or annoyed when they don’t care, then “you aren’t cut out to be a teacher.”

I told him that both my parents were teachers, that I had grown up around teachers, and that I was pretty sure that kind of lighthearted complaining was a perfectly normal part of being a teacher. His response? If the teachers I knew talked or thought negatively about their students, ever, then “they were probably shit teachers.”

Think about that for a second. Think about the extreme level of arrogance it takes to, as a teacher with less than a month of experience (much of which has been spent training rather than teaching), assume that you know better than the lifetime’s worth of teachers I grew up with, including my parents who, between the two of them, have something like thirty years of teaching experience (in fact, it may be closer to forty).

Then there’s the fact that he, the man who killed someone’s pet and then lectured the owner about how his culture was wrong, has the gall to lecture me about my attitude towards anything.

I didn’t really respond to him (because what’s the point?), just went back to class, had lunch and came home. I’m still pretty angry about it, but my day was improved somewhat by stopping and chatting with some of my neighbors on the way home. These are the guys who work at a restaurant downstairs; I interviewed one of them about the olympics so a bunch of them are in the video in the post below this.

Yesterday, they shared some watermelon with me after one of them accidentally hit me in the chest with a large piece. (It was unintentional; still, one never expects to be hit by watermelon.) Today I just stopped on my way home because I was frustrated and wanted to talk about the roommate thing with someone. They asked me to sit down, so I sat for a while and chatted with them about that, my work, and then a bit about the Olympics.

Since they’re all male (all my Chinese teachers have been women)–and since my Chinese isn’t actually that good–I have a hard time keeping up with them sometimes. It’s good practice, but it makes me feel very stupid sometimes. They ask me a question, and then have to explain their meaning five different ways before I answer…maybe by the time I’m done here I’ll have it down to four or three.

Today I had my first class. I was fairly nervous about it beforehand because I was taking over someone else’s class for the week–the original teacher is taking this week off to move–and I was teaching the lowest level class we offer here: preschool. So, essentially, I was told to write a lesson that would amuse preschool kids for an hour and a half, and teach them some things, including reviewing a bunch of old vocab (Snake! Notebook! Pencil Case! Soup!) and learning some new stuff (Big! Small! Hot! Cold!).

Needless to say, I was pretty panicked when I actually stepped in front of the class for the first time. I think I did a decent job of hiding it, and it turned out they were more terrified of me than I of them. At the end of the first activity, which involved me chasing students and trying to tag them after they read a specific vocab word, I heard one of the girls say (in Chinese to the TA) “the teacher is frightening!”. I think she was sort of joking, though.

Anyway, the kids definitely had fun, and they seemed to learn some stuff, too. They were very solid on the review material, and picked up the new vocab I was teaching them very quickly. For 4-6 year olds, they were pretty calm. All in all, it was a good class.

The highlight, probably, was when I was doing a relay game with them where I ask one student, “How are you?” The student must respond, “I am fine,” then turn to the next student in line and ask them, “How are you?” and so on down the line. One of the girls, Coco, was pretty sharp but didn’t have the longest attention span, and during one of the relays she clearly forgot what was going on. The student next to her asked her “How are you?” and she froze for a moment. She turned to me, looked at me with extremely wide eyes, and then turned back to the student who had asked her how she was and said brightly, “Hello!”

It was way better if you were there. I promise not to turn this blog into “(Chinese) Kids Say the Darndest Things (in English Class)”, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t a downright heartwarming experience.

Also, thanks to everyone for the many kind words following my last two posts. Please don’t worry about me; I’m ok.