A Quick Blast from the Past – Annie

 For the past couple of weeks Lin and I (mostly Lin) have been organizing a visit from our study abroad alma mater, Associated Colleges in China (ACC). The plan, originally formulated by our former director Will, was for the students of ACC to get a taste of life in rural China and for Yong Feng to solicit (hopefully) a new lot of vassals to join our ranks in the upcoming years. Overall, the visit proved to be a success. Perhaps we’ll even see a few of these ACC caterpillars cocooning into beautiful Yong Feng butterflies in the future. 

 The 40 ACC students and their accompanying teachers comprised our largest visiting cohort to date. Yong Feng is a 示范学校 (demonstration school). As such, our classrooms are often occupied by local teachers and administrators wanting to listen-in on our classes and get a feel for our, somewhat unique, style of teaching. Therefore, it was essentially effortless welcoming the ACC students into our classrooms. Although I will say that speaking Chinese at the front of a classroom for former Chinese professors did call back some sickening memories of stumbling over the translation of “beriberi” and the like in the unforgiving classes of ACC.

Since Gabi had not yet returned from America (she went home for the National Holiday), Lin and I took over her first grade P.E. class. Hats off to Gabi for doing that every week. I believe I’ve officially graduated to adulthood, because never have I felt so empathetic to the statement “Kids have so much energy” as I did when I taught first grade P.E.. Luckily, the ACC students provided a much needed energy boost. One of the visiting students even taught a little Kong Fu to the first graders. From what I hear, in nearly every class the kids took very well to the ACCers jumping into the lessons. I think the boys of Yong Feng were especially excited to see other men at the school.

When it was coming time to leave I had a handful of students approach me expressing interest in the program. One student asked about the relevance of my experience at ACC to my experience at Yong Feng. Clearly the language foundation, especially the speaking foundation, has been essential to my ability to communicate in the classroom. More implicitly, and arguably more valuable, is something I experienced everyday of being abroad with ACC-- a concrete example of how an effective foreign language classroom is structured. The utilization of visuals (written and pictorial) as references, paired with repetitive questioning are both integral parts of the ACC classroom and, I would guess, most foreign language classrooms. The use of the two approaches in a classroom seems intuitive, and yet executing them, especially the incessant repetition part, can feel a bit odd. I believe that, because of my familiarity to the use of repetition and visuals in the classroom, the transference of these two strategies to my own classroom has been a bit more natural. I only hope that my fourth grade English students feel the same…. (at times my class in anything but smooth and natural).

So, thanks for a good time ACC!