Most chinese teachers in taiwan are friendly and competent. But I can always find something to complain about so I give you…
The Seven Habits of Highly Annoying Chinese Teachers
1-Select a few dozen english words you will never translate. Pepper your speech with these words even when teaching korean and japanese students. Use them incorrectly.
2-Regail your students with elaborate race theories. Dwell especially on the superiority of taiwanese males to all other asian males.
3- Design a lesson plan. Use it every week. Never deviate. Never ever deviate. Never stray from the following topics: food, beauty, health and fashion.
4- Stick to standard mainland pronunciation. No wait, add extra ERs. Never uncurl your tongue. Encourage your students to correct the pronunciation of native taiwanese.
5- Mention your trip to canada 6 years ago at least once every class. Show off your knowledge of foreign culture. Argue with the foreigners in your class. You know better than they do.
6- If your daughter, son, brother, sister in law or cousin twice removed is studying in America, remind your students twice a day. If he’s going to a “famous school,” three times a day.
7- Refer to your 30-something students as “xiaopengyou” and “guai haizi.”
Teacher speaks perfectly good english with no asian accent (ABC) and throws in a fake taiwanese accent every once and a while to sound more authentic. Flipping annoying it is!
Dong bu dong your students to death, but dont pause even one second to actually listen for a bu dong! grrrrrrrr :fume:
Write so freaking fast on the white board that your writing is complete chicken scratch…students can’t make out an 一 (i) from a ___ (fill in the blank mark).
Write new vocabulary characters on the white board (dont add pin yin or MPS) and Write example sentences with brand spanking new characters that are not even in the text and dont define them!
Test your students every day, sometimes two times a day…but never ever go over mistakes or incorrect answers. Just tell your students…study more! (Hmmm…I am beginning to think I spent 16000 for a text book and not a class.)
A very good friend of mine stitched up his one to one Chinese teacher beautifully by telling her he was an eskimo, his brother’s name was Captain Hook - after his hand was bitten off by a whale. There is plenty of room for fun in ignorance.
EDIT: Now, now, no blaming teach for your frustration, lads.
One thing they teach in TESOL training is “Don’t ask students ‘Do you understand?’” because the replies are completely unreliable. Instead the teacher should use concept checking techniques.
Apparently they don’t teach this basic idea in TCSOL training!
That’s basically what you have done. All of the Mandarin teaching programs here are geared to teaching you to read, not to speak. But…
…stay in school. Especially while you are still new here. If you stop taking classes, thinking that you can do just as well studying on your own, you will almost certainly nnever learn Chinese and you will learn that you can live here fine without knowing it. Fork over that NT$16,000 a quarter for two years and put in 30 minutes a day outside of class, and you’ll be well on your way.
Dominate the class time telling the class about your life story (instead of allowing the students to try and talk).
Contradict students when they talk about their own countries (which you invited them to do in round 10000000 of ‘so what’s it like in your country…’).
Put on videos, videos and more videos (my current class has watched 8 videos in 8 weeks!).
Run tests for at least 2 hours a week.
Talk a lot about how different Westerners are from Easterners (is that a word?), and make sure the subtext makes the Westerners in the class feel uncomfortable.
Translate anything that you can into fucked up English instead of trying to explain in Chinese.
Never do group work. Never do pair work. Never go outside the text book (except videos). Never think that foreigners might actually be capable at being good at Chinese. Never let foreigners get away with criticising Taiwan. Never admit that you’ve forgotten how to write a character, or that you can’t write hanyu pinyin very well.
My teacher is great. It took a few weeks of shouting him down, and the occasional lesson where I still have to do this but in general great. I highly reccomend one on one teaching, so that you can influence the lesson plan, explin when you are uncomfortable and just throw a hissy fit when you need it…of course it costs me a lot more than 16K a quarter though for about half the time you guys are getting in lessons.
Derek, I work full time and am trying to launch a business so there is no way I can have regular lesson times, also being super undisciplined I would skip classes if I couldn’t arrange them on a whim.
I don’t get how people afford to not work and study full time, but I am very envious of your position…
-Speaking and writing are the same thing. Force your students to learn spoken and written chinese at the same pace. Force foreigners who’ve been speaking chinese for years to start over again at “ni hao ma” because they can’t write it.
-Pace reading and writing instruction to the comfort level of any japanese students you may have in your class. Spend hours of class time giving japanese students extra help with their pronunciation, but do not offer foreigners additional help with learning to write characters. That has to be done at home.
Welcome your new, but unwanted, foreign student to your class by making them an example via their bad mistakes. Then when you want them out of the class, make up an ‘excuse’ saying a 30 something was being disruptive (asking questions because she was new). Then proceed to create hell in the student’s life by ignoring her, or mocking her because of her mistakes. Then when the student goes to protest, to cover your ass= 1st you have the foreign student advisor with a chinese co-worker go in and ask the class was the student actually disruptive. Then in front of the both of then raise almighty hell to make her look bad, even thought the student is sitting across from you crying her eyes out because of humiliation and telling the truth.
Remember kiddies, the customer ain’t always right in this country…
Sorry, after I posted I realised that all that’s wrong with the world was represented right there in what I’d said. Tears are good. Shedding your own is a whole lot better than trying to force them out of someone else.
My Chinese teacher, trying to do a lesson about, ‘What each country is famous for,’ asked me a country, I’d say a random thing, she made a guttural ‘uh uh’ sound then told me the ‘real’ answer.
Germany. Me: War. Her: No, White wine.
Holland. Me: Whores. Her: No, flowers.
France: Me: Mona lisa. Her: No, red wine.
And so on… UNTIL…
England. Me: Being excellent at everything. Her: No, Princess Diana.
ha is that the old teacher (Zhang1 Dai4 Qi2) in Shi-Da she is one teacher that absolutly hates weterners, doesn’t matter your level she does not want you in the class, either she will say your chinese isn’t good enough or it’s too good. If for some reason you still insist on studying with her expect her to hold up your test in front of the entire class and ask “now why does she get such low grades doesn’t she have language exchange ?”.
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