First Day Jitters

The first day it’s hard to know who is more nervous – the Chinese students and teachers who have never held a conversation with a foreigner in English, or the foreign teachers who are wondering how the program that they have worked so hard to create will actually roll out.

Our numbers are down this year, largely because this campus of the university is closing three weeks earlier than other campuses of the university. “Earthquake strengthening” repair is to be done on most of the buildings and the summer break is longer than usual. But be that as it may, all who registered showed up today, except for a few students who for some reason chose to attend their commencement instead. They’ll join us tomorrow.

The morning begins with opening ceremonies, a formality that starts every program. Top administrators sit on the front row with the leaders of EESI, and anyone who has a doctorate on the team. There are a few speeches lauding the benefits of learning English and the foreign teachers are introduced.

Once the ceremony is done, we launch into the opening plenary session, complete with songs, instructions, and a skit demonstrating language learning with the use of Swahili. As the foreign teachers stumble over the pronunciation of Swahili, the students begin to loosen up and laugh.

After plenary session, the next step is assessment of each students. The Chinese teachers gather the students in small groups with word games that we prepared, while each student has a short structured interview that will give us a raw score of their fluency, structure, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

By then it’s time for lunch and we dismiss the learners while we sort the interview scores and determine the classes. All the Chinese teachers go with three of our most experienced foreign teachers, while the Chinese students are divided into five classes, each taught by two foreign teachers.

After lunch, the students return and are sent to their five classes. Because of facility issues, today we meet in the same auditorium for classes as we did for plenary. Not the best way to start the course, but it actually worked quite well. The afternoon ended with most of the classes creating large posters with a slogan and logo to mark their class as distinctive from the rest.

We gather the foreign teachers at the end of the day and debrief for a few minutes. Considering the jitters at the beginning of the day, we end with smiles on the faces of the learners, and a sense of confidence building in the minds and hearts of the teachers.