Teach English in Dongcun Nongchang - Yuncheng Shi

My first teaching experience occurred during Navy boot camp. Chief Petty Officer, Joseph Scibek was the officer in charge of my training. He promoted me to Recruit Chief Petty Officer to lead my Company of eighty other recruits under his supervision. One day while I was leading the group in drilling, I raised my voice and cursed to get their attention. Later, privately, he counseled me on the correct way to gain respect and to be a leader. It was a teaching moment I have never forgotten. It is unnecessary, and indeed probably counterproductive to raise your voice heatedly to make a point. Under the guidance of Chief Scibek I gained a lot of self-confidence and leadership skills which are important in any teaching environment and have served me well. My second teaching experience was while I was an undergraduate university student, but I didn't recognize it as a learning experience until many years after I graduated. I was struggling academically during my second year when during a laboratory class, my professor, Dr. Ralph Shangraw stopped by and made a few comments that essentially said: "I know you are a better student that you appear to be based on your grades." My grades increased over the coming years, and I eventually graduated with honors. I later came to recognize that his show of confidence in me was a turning point in my education and life. It was a lesson that I applied later when I became a professor. Upon his untimely death, years after I graduated, I came to realize that mine was not the only life he influenced. At his funeral service, many of my former classmates stepped forward to offer stories like mine as to how he had changed their lives too. As I write this now I can clearly see him standing beside me talking quietly at my lab table. I can even visualize where we were in the lab room. For many years now, I have recognized these first two teaching experiences as pivotal events in my life. My next teaching experience was as a preceptor for the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. I was involved in the education of more than twenty-five students over a period of several years ranging from one to three students per semester. It was indeed a learning experience for both the students and me. For me, it was also a humbling experience as I discovered it was easier to be a student than a teacher. Dealing with the multiple personalities, and egos as they focused on completing their education proved a challenge for me. A little later in my career while working in a Wellness Center, I became a Certified Diabetes Educator and developed a formal teaching program for diabetics through an experimental program of the local hospital. The lessons I learned there were the importance of motivation and a desire to learn on the part of those you are trying to educate. Most of the clients we saw were in denial and were only attending the classes because it was a requirement of their insurance program. It was very discouraging for me not to have been able to help them gain better control of their disease. Perhaps the most embarrassing experience occurred a few years later. I was a young member of a professional association in line for future leadership positions, when I decided, with a few others that the “grey beards” weren’t moving fast enough to make changes to our organization. I and a few others staged an “awareness moment” at the annual convention, that although at the time seemed to be successful, it later became clear that it was a disaster. The lesson learned was that patience and working within the system, although it might take a little longer, will ultimately achieve the most successful and enduring results. It seems that perhaps the earlier lessons hadn’t yet been fully appreciated and developed by me. Years later, as I matured and began to understand the lessons I have mentioned above, I was offered a position as an Adjunct Professor at a large university, where I successfully taught for ten years. My first class had only twenty-six students, but within a few years it expanded to a classroom capacity of 49 students and then expanded again to two sessions with a total of ninety-eight students with a waiting list each semester. The student body was very diverse with about twenty percent from other countries. I began my first semester with very little mentoring and struggled with the very sophisticated audio-visual equipment. But I learned, and sometimes it was from the students that I learned. I found very quickly that for each hour in the class room I needed about three or four hours of preparation. I revised my lessons frequently, based many times on the class interests. Many of the ITTT lessons would have been very useful to me. I found that much of what this course taught me I had been doing in some fashion. I credit a lot of that to my own education and to the exceptional people I mentioned in my first two examples. I am still growing and have much more to learn and look forward to continuing to teach.