Shell in China

At Longnan Teachers’ College, my teaching assignment is Oral English for first-year students in the English department. That means that in three short years, my students will be standing on the other side of the podium; they will be the teachers rather than the students.

With this in mind, I feel that part of what I need to do here is not only teach speaking skills, but also equip my students with some skills that will help them be successful in their own classrooms. This means that when I am preparing lessons for each week, I try to find things that will benefit them as students of English, but also create activities that they can tweak in the future for their own use.

This thought process is what led me to spend the week teaching 20-year olds to do the “Hokey Pokey!” That’s right! Each class, I hauled nearly 50 students outside to the dirt basketball courts to sing and dance and shake it all about!

In the classroom, I taught them the lyrics and the basic dance and then we headed outside where we actually had room to make a giant circle. I would choose a leader to stand in the middle and pick a body part (a much safer proposition than it may have been with my American middle school students!) and lead the song. After being leader, the student got to choose the next leader to come to the middle and we did it all again.

After singing and dancing (and attracting quite a crowd of onlookers) we headed back to the classroom to talk about how they could use this song in their own classrooms in the future. I am trying to help them see outside the “stand behind the podium and lecture” teaching style, so brining in activities and songs is one way that I mix methodology with speaking skills. I won’t be here to see this group of students graduate and get teaching jobs, but I hope that the goofy things I teach them in class will resurface in their own classrooms in the future!