Migrant School

Taking this opportunity to be productive while procrastinating from studying for my Chinese test tomorrow.

Last week was my first week of going to the migrant school to teach English. I believe I wrote on this way back when I first found out that I was going to be able to do this, but I'll refresh your memories briefly. So the students who attend the migrant school are children of migrant workers, or persons from outside of Shanghai, these are the people who do the lowest level work as street cleaners, street vendors and other work. For them Shanghai, and other cities that have benefited from the economic reforms of the seventies, is an opportunity to find work. However, wages here are not quite what we're accustomed to back home and they make very, very little. Normally these parents would have to spend an incredible amount to send their kids to school, even more than for a Shanghai person (it's messed up). And of course education is a means to a better end.

This is where the migrant school comes in, I can't remember if the students don't pay anything or pay very little, but it's much better than if they had to go to another Shanghai school. The school itself is unimpressive, a cement building with a few levels that holds about 700 kids grades k-8 (I think). They have desks, a blackboard, chalk and textbooks... that's about it.

I'm teaching sixth graders with one other kid who speaks much better Chinese than I do, but he's never done any teaching and I've at least taken an education class, so I guess we're a good pair. There's probably at least 30 kids in our class, maybe closer to 40, all sitting two by two in neat little rows. It's one of two sixth grade classes, apparently ours is the more well behaved one while the other fails to cooperate frequently.

So basically we kind of just threw ourselves into it, they have textbooks (we each have a copy also), so we picked up where they last left off and started practicing words for that lesson. The words they are learning are not exactly practical, but in theory they've been learning English since the first grade, so they should have a decent grasp on the language. We started off writing the words on the board, words like "whale," "quarter," "crop" (they kept pronouncing it as "crap," it was pretty funny), and about a dozen more. So it would go I would say the word and they would repeat, then we go back over the words that they didn't pronounce quite right. Then we played hangman, which seems to be pretty popular.

All the kids are kind of like a small army, whenever we wanted them to say a word they would shout it, closer to scream in many cases. Also whenever we called on them to pick a letter for hangman they would first stand up and then tell us... a little different from my memories of the sixth grade.

Going to give them all English names next week, I think they'll enjoy that.

-AL