D - Our students

Looking over the blog, I realized we've really only alluded to our job here, which is teaching English.

As our faithful readers know, we are teaching at Dalian Maritime University. What may not be obvious is that the school is more than just teaching sailors. There are English majors, Information Management majors, Electrical Engineers, and so on. In other words, at least for China, it's a standard multi-disciplinary university covering liberal arts and science. They do have a special program for maritime students however. The two majors for martime are Marine Engineering and Navigation. The Marine Engineers will apparently end up on ship supporting the chief engineers and working on huge diesel engines and so forth. Eventually they will work their way up to chief engineer. The Navigation students will hang out on the bridge of ships and use a telescope to navigate the seas. Er, only kidding, they do have GPS on Chinese ships. Some intrepid navigators may end up as ship captains.

Although it's somewhat easy to mock the career choice of maritime students because it's so foreign to us, they are really excited about it. Managing a ship for import/export companies and multinationals is a very important part of the global economy so I am glad these students exist. I hope they like us enough to keep them on commercial ships and not serving on future Chinese aircraft carriers!

Anyway, so how do C and I relate to these various majors? Well, most likely because we don't have a TESOL (teach english as a second language) certificate and no prior teaching experiences, we've been assigned to teach majors called Marine Engineering, Automation, and Mechanism. The class for all of them is called Oral English I. The Automation and Mechanism students are completing military training through week 6 so we haven't had them yet. It's unclear to me what these majors are but I suspect they are also shipboard. The 4 classes I do have (C's as well) are all Marine Engineers and they are ALL male. Yes, not a single girl in any of our classes. And yes, they all wear cute little white sailor outfits with lapels on the the shoulders.

The engineering students we have are okay. Their english ability varies widely from inability to say anything to students you can actually have a conversation with. The skill disparity of course makes it difficult to plan lessons.

Interesting observations about our Chinese students
1) Must harness the group mentality rather than working against it. I swear that if I asked a question and only one student in the class knew the answer that the other 29 students would have it written on their paper within 30 seconds. You cannot create the concept of individual work. You will tell them you will fail them, you will make sure they understand and agree that this is an individual assignment....and without fail they will all "collaborate". My response to this is to create group activities where each group has different materials or objectives...and although some better students end up doing more of the work, at least it's not a total wash.

2) Lack of maturity. The students we have in our engineering classes are Juniors. Now freshmen are often immature in the US as well but usually by Junior year there's a certain amount of maturity gained. My personal belief is that these students have everything chosen for them. Their parents, their teachers, the school administrators either directly make the choice or strongly influence every choice. They also lack life experience - buying train tickets, awareness of other cultures, managing your own life. In a lot of ways I feel more like I teach high schoolers than college students. Our student volunteers don't fall into this category - they are a lot more mature than the other students but even there I have a sense of this almost child-like earnestness rather than adulthood. You begin to understand where this comes from when you find out that they can't change their major. Whatever they pick going in is what they are required to do the rest of the time!

In a future entry I'll address the trials and tribulations of lesson planning.