A New Semester: Minzu Jr. High School

This is my second week of school at Minzu Jr. High School. As you all know, I bid Minghua farewell last January, and am now working with two new co-teachers at another middle school across town. While the semester started off slightly rough, things are beginning to settle into patterns, and I find myself enjoying the new school and the new students. Whereas last semester I worked with eighth graders, this semester I am teaching all seventh graders. I have 500 students in fifteen classes (instead of 750 from nineteen - smaller class sizes this time around), and I see them every week (instead of every other week). This will be a decided improvement, and I am hoping to try to learn most of their names. In addition to the fifteen classes, I also teach two periods of an English conversation club class.

The frustrations which I am facing at my school this semester are similar to the problems I had at Minghua and are, I believe, based on a misunderstanding of how the program works. The Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) program is based on the idea of co-teaching. Young American college graduates are paired with experienced native Taiwanese English teachers to work together in the classroom. The American ETAs are (obviously) native speakers and supposedly full of enthusiasm and crazy ideas. The local English teachers (LETs) are the ones in control of the classroom, with a vision of course goals, an understanding of their students and the years of wisdom to know how to run a class (class management etc). The program goals and perimeters were explained to us all at the beginning of the year during orientation, but certain schools do not seem to have absorbed the program ideals. Last semester, it took me a month or two in before I realized that my situation was different from most of the other ETAs. By that point, I felt that it was too late to change anything and thought that it would be easier to continue in the way things were already going. This semester, though, I really do want a "co-teaching" experience, so am hoping that my co-teachers will become more involved.

The problem lies in how some of the schools and co-teachers have interpreted the program. Instead of seeing us as partners who come in to join in with the work the LETs are already doing, they view us as specialty teachers who come into the schools to do "our thing." Therefore, the LETs do not see any role for themselves, and therefore, abstain from either contributing ideas or giving direction for how the class ought to run. While not ideal, this could work if I was indeed a specialty teacher, or a qualified teacher of anything, for that matter. However, I do not have a background in teaching, nor has the program ever given us solid training in education (assuming all along that we would not need it since we are each paired with multiple experienced teachers).

Let me back up for a moment and explain the last few weeks. After trying to get in touch with my new LETs all through January and February without a single response back, I was under the assumption that they had the semester under control and just expected me to show up and do whatever tasks or activity planning they assigned me. Since neither of them ever returned my emails or phone calls, I figured that they must not have anything for me to do to prepare for the new semester. To be honest, I was kind of excited to finally have co-teachers who would run the classroom and let me do my “foreign” bit on the side (remember, at Minghua, my co-teachers never helped me lesson plan and rarely participated in class, preferring to hang out in the back, grading papers from other classes etc). Two days before the first day of class, one of them finally contacts me and says we should meet Sunday. This sounded like a great idea to me, since I had not been to the new school since August and only knew what time to show up Monday because Fonda had asked the Bureau for my schedule. I had no idea what I would be doing, or even where I should go in the school.

Sunday afternoon, the day before school started, my LET casually asked me what I had planned for the semester since I am in charge of planning the entire curriculum. I started to laugh, thinking she had heard about Minghua and was making a joke. No no. She was entirely serious.

Ok, first of all, I do not want to plan another semester’s curriculum, because that is not my job, nor am I qualified. I was not an education major in school and had no teaching experience prior to last semester. While last semester worked out fine, it could have been so much better if I had had someone work alongside me who knew the students’ abilities better and was trained in teaching EFL. In asking my LET what the students’ English abilities were, she replied very vaguely about having done phonics the previous semester. Then I questioned her on what Minzu wanted out of the course. Were they looking for me to teach them new vocabulary and language tools, make it more of an American culture class, or just play fun games and do activities/projects with them? The answer was that I could do whatever I wanted. So in other words, they were asking me to plan a curriculum for students whom I did not know (either temperament or language skill level) and giving me absolutely no guidance in course objectives or goals.

Secondly, they asked me to do this THE DAY BEFORE THE SEMESTER STARTED. We had an entire month off of school. If they really wanted me to design a new curriculum, why would they not ask me before break, so that I could spend time thinking about and planning for it? My co-teacher responded to my incredulous stare by pointing out that I already had my own curriculum which I used at Minghua, so I could just do that at Minzu too (as if I have teaching materials which I just peddle from one school to the next?). The problem with this is that I was teaching a higher grade level last semester (eighth graders instead of seventh), and the English level at Minghua is just higher across the board. After I showed my Minzu co-teachers the book I used last semester, they finally agreed with me that it was indeed too difficult for their students (why had they not bothered to look into any of this back in January?!). On Monday afternoon after our first two classes, we sat down and pulled together topics from other English textbooks to make up our own book.

Eager to avoid the miscommunication problems from last semester, I decided to directly ask my co-teachers about lesson-planning together and what our respective roles in the classroom would be. My LETs told me that they had no intention of helping me lesson plan because they had nothing to contribute. According to them, I am the young American teacher with all of the fun new ideas. Despite them having a decade of teaching experience, they have no good ideas; anything they contributed would just be “the same old, same old,” defeating the purpose of why they applied for the program. They also do not see themselves having a role in the classroom. The students already see my them on a daily basis, and would rather just have me teaching them for our “special class.” One of my LETs mentioned that although I am called an “ETA – English Teaching Assistant,” they see me as the main teacher, and themselves as the class “assistant."

After the initial shock and vexation last week, I have calmed down and tried to look at the situation more objectively. Honestly, being the one planning for and leading the class does not bother me. I do not mind the work, and generally have fun coming up with ideas. What concerns me is that I am not a qualified teacher. I may have loads of ideas, but I have no idea which ones are good and which ones will flop. I know I will have fun with the students for the next few months, but whether or not they will learn much from me is an entirely different matter. The school may believe that having a foreign teacher in the classroom is beneficial no matter what, but I would argue that giving that inexperienced teacher the back-up help and support which an involved co-teacher could offer would bring even better results in effective teaching for the students. In the end, I will enjoy myself regardless, but the students may suffer, which I believe is unfortunate, lamentable and unnecessary.