Teaching is Hell

While many people are complaining about having to transition their lives (job, education, shopping, etc.) to doing things online, I am one of the people who was already doing that. My job is completely online. I live in Vietnam, but I do not have a job here.

I work for a Chinese company and I teach children English online. Just like any other job, some days are great and some days are terrible. Last night I had an interesting lesson.

My student was an 8 year old girl who goes by the English name Maggie. She is one of my more difficult students. She often walks away from the computer in the middle of the lesson which leaves me to sit and look at an empty room until her parents peek in the door and place her back in front of the camera. When she can be bothered enough to acknowledge my presence, she likes to ignore the lesson and just show me all of her toys. However, every now and then, she is somewhat attentive. Last night was one of those times. Almost.

The lesson was about the various ways people work with animals. It discusses sheep herding, police dogs, rescue animals, and service animals.

Since my primary purpose is actually to teach English, I always encourage a lot of extra dialogue. I want my students to practice conversing in this new language. Instruction is great, but practice is necessary to get good at anything. So, to start off, I asked Maggie to look at the picture and tell me where they are.

As usual with Maggie, I got silence. So I used the trick that works with most children. I suggested a wrong answer.

"Are they at the library?"

She shook her head.

"Well, where are they?"

 

 

Once again, I got a blank stare. Now, this girl can speak English. It is quite limited, but she understands me and could answer if she chose to. So, I cranked up my classroom personality to "clown" which is just one setting lower than "dancing monkey" and tried harder to get her to engage.

"Would you like to go there? You could throw snowballs at your sister."

Maggie leaned toward the computer and activated her pen. She often draws or writes answers instead of talking to me. She is so much fun. 😒

"Maggie, where are they?"

 

Hell? Thank you, Maggie.

While that was not the correct answer, it was engagement and I wanted to reward that. Hopefully, we could build from here. I decided to run with it.

"They are in hell? I guess they could be in hell. I know that I hate cold weather and snow." 

She furrowed her brow and shook her head. She drew under her previously written word.

AH!
Not hell, but HILL.

I thought she was making a joke about how it would be terrible to have to be there, but she was just answering my question. In English, we would probably say mountain. But her English is not that good. She took the Mandarin word (山 - Shān) which can mean mountain or steep hill and simply misspelled it. She wasn't trying to make a joke.

That explained why she never smiled the entire time. Well, that and the fact that she really doesn't like me.

But to show me that she did know what she was talking about, she labelled the rest of the picture also.

I turned to the next page, but she never did smile.