TEFL Yongkang

Back in 2007 I had completed a Masters in Peace and Development studies. I wanted to get a job with an NGO somewhere, but most of them want some kind of voluntary experience to show what a good trooper you are. So I decided to go to india to help a charity which focused its efforts on micro industry, especially women’s involvement in it. As I thought I would be mainly helping out in the office with administration, I was rather surprised when they told me I would be teaching english one day. I asked them what types of books they had, what was the curriculum, did we have a blackboard...etc. Many basic things that most teachers take for granted. Of course they had nothing, the classroom happened to be someone’s bedroom and I was given no time to prepare the class, not even a scrap of paper. They told me “Just speak english”. Luckily, I had my camera with me and we looked at pictures of ireland and talked about that for a while and made some other small talk. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, but I didn’t appreciate being thrown in the deep end. The next day I was again told “Just speak english”, and every day after that. Eventually the class began to grow in size and a second volunteer began to teach english at the other end of the bed. After about a week of this it dawned on me that that I would be the in-house teacher and so we moved to a proper building. Still no blackboard or chalk arrived though. I started to visit the internet café regularly to scour the BBC Learning english pages. It saved my bacon on a daily basis. At the time I didn’t know about any of the other websites and I never thought to look up communication activities, I just concentrated on grammar exercises. The classes were extremely enjoyable without the activities though. We spent most of the time conversing about every imaginable topic from dictators to functions of the organs. The classes were composed of boys and girls and ranged in age from 8 to 19. As the class got bigger, teaching the different levels soon became a problem. I asked another volunteer to take the lower level, but there were problems that resulted from this. The other volunteer was a young American. In the state where we were there is a strict, traditional, segregation of the sexes. Most of his class were 14-15 year old girls who giggled at everything he said and would not speak to him directly. He was extremely frustrated and refused to teach them. I had sent some of the weaker boy students to that class too, but they refused to leave my class because they did not want to be put with the girls. It was offensive to them. I too had some problems with the younger girls in the class. They were painfully shy because there were boys there. They simply would not speak a word if any of the boys were present. Also, girls from that particular state are not encouraged to do any hobbies. Sadly, they only watch Bollywood movies, clean the house or cook. As a result some of our conversations were quite limited. The older girls in the class had more confidence and were less likely to defer to the boy’s opinions. Luckily, not long after, another female volunteer arrived and took over the class with the younger girls. They opened up to her because there were no boys present, and I went back to teaching my advanced class. Truthfully, I had a wonderful time teaching there, and even though initially the thought of teaching was abhorrent to me, I soon grew to love it. It was very satisfying. I left a folder there for the next volunteer with all my photocopies. It was not structured like the ITTT course was. I jumped from grammar topic to topic, usually sticking to easy things because I had no formal training myself. And I came to realise that teaching english was the best thing for me to do in india.