Pu'er No.2
on Tina's Journal (China), 18/Nov/2009 12:54, 34 days ago
I was asked yesterday if I could go and give a talk to the students at Pu'er No.2 Middle School in Simao as part of their 'communication' lesson. I happily agreed as I have been there before and friends with the vice head. So, this evening I went along and was pleasantly surprised to meet the Team Leader of the English Teachers. His name is Mr Yang and has been teaching for 40 years. He is so outgoing and has a fantastic rapport with the students. As I walked into the small lecture hall, he sat down at the piano and all the students sang me a welcome song. It's a famous Chinese song which Mr Yang had translated into English, all about welcoming friends to Beijing. Of course, they changed Beijing to Pu'er, aka Simao! I didn't quite know what to aspect and how communicative the students would be. They are all senior students ages 16 to 17. After briefly introducing myself, I was asked various questions from'What were my first impressions of China?'to'Can you please talk about your home town?'The time flew by and I was disappointed to hear Mr Yang say 'Now the last question'as I was really enjoying the response from the students. Many of the students are not native to Simao and come from the surrounding countryside. Quite often this fact is used as an excuse by the teachers for their poor level of English. It has nothing to do with the fact that they come from the countryside, it is more about how they have been taught. Ones level of intelligence is not dependent on weather they live in a city or in the country, although, being in a city means they may have access to more resources which gives a student more chance to succeed. After the lesson, I had a nice little chat with Mr Yang on our way to dinner and I asked him about where he studied English and if he had had a native English Teacher. I was forgetting the fact that he had grown up in Mao's China, so there were fewer opportunities to be taught by foreign teachers. He told me that people who had an interest in the outside world during these terrible years (his words), were thought to be spies. Thank goodness China has moved on since then. Today, the headmaster compared my talk to that of Barack Obama who recently gave a talk to students at a Shanghai University. The head said we all live in this world together and we can learn from each other. Unfortunately, I wasn't in a position to talk about human rights issues and freedom of speech as Obama did. However, I have been invited back to the school so the opportunity may arise!!