[ESL中国] Grading & Classroom Discipline (teaching in China).
04 November 2017 [link youtube]
Advice on teaching English in China.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
hey guys this is part of a series of
relatively short focused videos giving you practical advice advice you may not want to hear but advice that's actually useful about teaching English in China I teach at the university level she teaches kids but I've been involved with I've been involved with training right preparing for do her job I had both experiences in the last year really and there will be a playlist somewhere you can look around this video and figure it out but there will be a number of other videos of this kind on this channel if what you're hearing seems useful to you we're gonna deal with two topics in this video grading and classroom discipline so I think a lot of people just don't they don't think sympathetically about their bosses and the administrators in the university that work for if you're in university level English teaching or in the school that they work for I was in a situation just a couple of months ago where after my semester wrapped up I got a phone call from someone higher up in the university saying look this student failed and she's very unhappy we got to do something to help them I do think that when that administrator started the phone call I think she assumed she was just gonna bully me into raising the grade and there were a lot of kind of you'll see anecdotes about that on the internet but I responded in a totally principled way I said you can look at the list of grades for that class the majority of people writing the same exam got over 80% there were a lot of people who got grades in the 90s if that exams the exam was not too hard and this particular student got 8% eighth not like it's not a situation when students getting 49 and somebody's making a phone call saying could you bump it up from 49 to 50 once the student passes know this is eight and it was interesting but you know I I stood my ground and total the principal way and the other person I think she's also a principal person she just hadn't really thought it through she was you know sometimes people just have the attitude of oh there's a leak in the wall stop the leak they're not really thinking through what the problem solution she you know cuz the way this professor said it is we have to do something to help her we have to do some help soon I said I agree and what can we do help her you know well just say that back I'm not gonna raise a grade from 8 percent the 50 percent that's ridiculous so I agree with you her level of English is way too low to be in this course she can't complete the program and I know when they graduate this this course they're supposed to be English teachers themselves it's supposed to be a high enough level that they go from being students to being teachers in one year so I said so what do want to can we set up remedial classes can we set up special sessions look you know I was offering to use some of my own time and I was asking this professor she can you say do you want a set of special special lessons help the student I think was pretty obvious from the other end of the phone that she didn't you know what I mean so this is my first thing about grading a lot of people come into this with cultural stereotypes and South Korea is really infamous for that if people like literally handing you a red envelope full of money to raise someone's great or putting pressure on you or something I think it's just important to think about the other people in the equation what they're trying to accomplish and what you're trying to accomplish for me I do grade generously when I assign grades to students I do try to be fair learn the other hand I actually do not judge the student based on their level of ability when they come into the classroom so in a sense that's that's an uneven scale that's making it easier for the students for the lower level so if I have a student who can just barely speak English who's much lower than the average of the students and they come in and give an oral presentation they prepared well they did a good original written composition they tried their hardest that were trying to pronounce the English clearly they made it they made a good effort relative to their level of ability they can get an 80 or 90 from me no problem and another student is at a very high level of ability in a sense I'm kind of normalizing that where you start out you could be a very high level ability and make no effort I have just I have just one student like that this year I have one student she's at a high level of ability she's the one who went to the provincial competition so the other professors picked her out as being especially good too and I think that what's her head but she would come in with like five words jot down or no prep at all no notes and would just kind of improvise some crap for her formal presentation for a formal oral exam it was like look you may be better off than half the other students but you know now this you didn't really answer the question you're not really living up to the criteria for the the assignments so you're getting a lower grade but I do rate generously because again I don't gain anything by giving students low grades and you have to ask yourself what are you calibrating your grading for what are you trying to measure one of the big differences so she's teaching children I'm teaching university students one of the big difference is how much time and effort you're putting into grading into evaluation so you want to design your whole course so that's effective so you're not wasting your own time because there's no point having a system where you're spending a lot of time making a measurement that's not not of any use to anyone it's not even used to students not even used to you but yeah fundamentally if I can give students a bunch of grades in the 80s and 90s I'm delighted to do that and I recognize I'm different from other professors a lot of professors come into this with their own emotional damage from their own experience as a student whether it was a high school university they feel like oh well if I could only get grades in the 70s when I was your age and university you should only be able to get grades in seven they have some like preconceived notion of what an A+ is and you got a you gotta leave that behind the dorm you like fundamentally what I look at the assignment I gave them and I do give very specific assignments so there's a list of things you know so they have to give a five-minute presentation they have to speak on this this this and this and I say look if they did everything the assignment asked to them they made a good effort then why shouldn't they get a hundred percent I don't give a hundred percent that often but like grades like 97 like you know they did everything in the assignment they made a couple mistakes or left out a couple things why shouldn't that be a grade in the 90s and old ultimately that's one of the ways you as a teacher can help them write assignments where it's really clear what its gonna mean to pass and what it's gonna mean to fail if you you know this assignment tells you what to do and they can do it and they can understand it and then you know I mean if if they totally fail to live up to the assignment they get a low grade but then most of the time you're gonna be giving them positive grades that again I think should reflect basically their effort and execution it shouldn't reflect the level of ability they're at before they came to your class anyway there's there's no point trying to measure that you can but there's no other if you do that then your grading scheme is just gonna be unequal and get more unequal then it's just whoever had a better education in high school before they became your student is getting a better grade alright enough about grading the second top of this video is class discipline which you also have to deal with um I had one semester here so I did two semesters to deflect Nemec year in the first semester I really forced everyone to not use their cell phones and to pay attention pay attention to me and to pay attention to the student speaking when students were doing presentations and in some ways that was very positive for a couple of the students it was traumatic because students who were breaking classroom discipline I would throw them out of the class normally I would do that there they're all female students all the problems for female students never with a male student so the females didn't have her cell phone and purse sitting on her desk and she'd be playing with her cell phone and talking to a friend and laughing or something being disruptive as well as not paying attention I would just take the purse and a cell phone and put in the hallway and say look if you don't want to study you don't have to be here you know you don't have to come to class and one student especially was really emotionally upset by that and you know she wrote me an apology letter later and stuff it was a big deal to her you know other students react in different ways I mean ultimately I don't care like I'm just trying to control the class and conduct the class and in some ways that kind of harsh discipline was really positive I can say for the mediocre students it meant they learned more and at a more positive classroom experience because otherwise and what I did this semester by contrast - I said to them look I don't need to force you guys to pay attention if you want to use your cell phones you can and what I've done this semester is I put the desks in the center of the lecture hall into a circle held with my class of 40 every every class there were nine students that are selected to sit in that circle and they're doing conversation practice they are getting more of my time and attention and I'm getting more of their time and attention and then for the other students I'm not enforcing class disappoint if they want to sit there and use their cell phone I'm ignoring that this semester but obviously not for the nine that are in the in the inner circle they should they should sharpen up and benefit more from the educational exercise we're doing in that class that day so and that method I've got to tell you it has advantages it really does we're using class time way more effectively I'm not spending my time and attention being punitive to other students I get to be more positive and encouraging but for the mediocre students it's a lot worse because they really become victims of their own limited attention span and they'd be getting a lot more out of the class if they just stood if they just sat there gazing at the chalkboard or gazing at whoever speaking whether it's me speaking of the student even they were just passively listening to the English being spoken they get a lot more out of it and I have a couple students where I recognize them I've known them for many months now where last semester they were really bright eyed and paying attention they were really good students in class and participate in this semester they're they're victims of their own short attention span some of them have the phone open Oh class and more commonly some of them get twenty minutes into the class or even sixty minutes into the class and then turn to their phone they've run out of they run out of gas through enough attention and in some ways I can respect that I don't hate or demonize the students do pay attention but it really is a big choice the bottom line is if you had two teachers working together you know two in tandem you could maintain a hundred percent discipline when you have one teacher working alone with 40 students then it's really an either/or choice because if I'm spending my attention being punitive and enforcing discipline and making people pay attention and these are these are basically adult students they're 20 and 21 years old you know and again even saying them look either study or get out you know either either participate positively or get it pay attention or get out then I'm not doing the other things I can be doing as a teacher she teaches more in the Japanese style which is to say there's one teacher and one translator so one native speaker of English one native speaker of Chinese that's the way the jet program works although in the jet program the native Japanese speaker has a much more active role but even then I mean sometimes you can win and sometimes you can't you have some class of students that are excellent but we had one experience where I we had taught the lesson before we taught one lesson with one class of kids and it went great and again it's not about how entertaining is so we in tandem taught I think it was you me and a translator I forget if it's translator Nam it was just you of me but with two of us we taught this lesson these kids and went great you know they recognized the educational value of it like the N if it was a good lesson they participated they were engaged they practiced the vocabulary and sentence structure items and then we taught the same lesson to a different class maybe the next day maybe just a few hours later or something and it was just awful the kids were just brats and they didn't pay attention and so on and I I can speak enough Chinese I was saying to them in Chinese look in this whole province there were like four native speakers of English that's maybe that's generous you know they're they're like eight white people but we might be the only ones who speak much at first I think we might be the only native speakers of English in this whole province there are some Dutch people who speak English okay but they're not native speakers how much oh no there's one of the couples case yeah there are four they're two Americans heroes are front oh there are four white people who speak English in the this whole province in dong and I said look they're only for foreigners you're speaking you got two of them in this classroom right now we're trying to help you this is really an opportunity for you and you're throwing it away you know what I mean and it's really a shame when the whole class is bad when the behavior is bad because some of those kids are capable of good work yes some of them just don't want to learn some of them just don't want to be there and I sympathize I know what it's like as a student to be forced into a position don't appeal but it's really a shame when the class as a whole when one part is dragging down the rest and so on and that is as I say that's really the question how much of your knee energy you're going to put in three weeks and that's basically negative policing the students and trying to compel them to pay attention or not misbehave and how much for energy you can put into something positive creative and really educational yeah in your situation at the college you can kick them out but that's true in my school you know the parents are paying for their kids to be there right no that's true say if you don't want to be here leave it's like you know the students are supposed to be there were kind of their guardians for the for this for these hours that they're at school so yes I think I have said that to them though like you know like if you don't wanna be a well yeah because they could sit in the corner or something you know if you just want to play video games on your phone get out like you can go sit over there they can't they can't leave the school thing but still yeah I have said that that kind of thing before yeah anyway so I gotta say both of these things both on grading and on school discipline I think my perspectives a little bit different I don't see the job of a teacher as being an entertainer I'm when I'm teaching I really I'm about communicating these vocabulary items the sentence structure whatever it is we're working on today and sometimes I do a lot of I do a lot of lessons that have historical content so there you know I did one lesson with your kids when you were absent and your boss was absent she called me in last minute to fill in and I taught them about the history of the English Industrial Revolution the Industrial Revolution in England and then that lesson again it's not like the kids were delighted they're like oh wow like this is a good lesson like thank you I'm like they learned a lot it was interesting it was engaging and you know we did simple stuff like the word coal CO al and what that is the version of the coal and industry and this kind of thing it was engaging for them but I'm not like a clown I'm not there to make them happy I think a lot of teachers do have an attitude that they're there to make these kids happy and that then your attitude is something totally different I can feel confident that what I'm teaching is worthwhile when I have a lesson like that it's good in terms of vocab grammar and also it has some kind of historical point it's something else in even if the kids are brats even if they don't respond positively and you know the other side of it is it was to make your kids happy if what you want to do is make people happy why why are you being a why are you why are you so reluctant to give them an 85 you don't mean why you reluctant to give them high grades giving them high grades could have a positive impact on their lives can pause them motivate them and so on design your assignments so that it is possible for the best students to get hundred-percent design your assignments in a way that's rewarding them in the most obvious way that doesn't make a clown out of you that doesn't trivialize what you're doing you know if you set up the obstacle course of the assignment in a way that they really can succeed and reward them without grades
relatively short focused videos giving you practical advice advice you may not want to hear but advice that's actually useful about teaching English in China I teach at the university level she teaches kids but I've been involved with I've been involved with training right preparing for do her job I had both experiences in the last year really and there will be a playlist somewhere you can look around this video and figure it out but there will be a number of other videos of this kind on this channel if what you're hearing seems useful to you we're gonna deal with two topics in this video grading and classroom discipline so I think a lot of people just don't they don't think sympathetically about their bosses and the administrators in the university that work for if you're in university level English teaching or in the school that they work for I was in a situation just a couple of months ago where after my semester wrapped up I got a phone call from someone higher up in the university saying look this student failed and she's very unhappy we got to do something to help them I do think that when that administrator started the phone call I think she assumed she was just gonna bully me into raising the grade and there were a lot of kind of you'll see anecdotes about that on the internet but I responded in a totally principled way I said you can look at the list of grades for that class the majority of people writing the same exam got over 80% there were a lot of people who got grades in the 90s if that exams the exam was not too hard and this particular student got 8% eighth not like it's not a situation when students getting 49 and somebody's making a phone call saying could you bump it up from 49 to 50 once the student passes know this is eight and it was interesting but you know I I stood my ground and total the principal way and the other person I think she's also a principal person she just hadn't really thought it through she was you know sometimes people just have the attitude of oh there's a leak in the wall stop the leak they're not really thinking through what the problem solution she you know cuz the way this professor said it is we have to do something to help her we have to do some help soon I said I agree and what can we do help her you know well just say that back I'm not gonna raise a grade from 8 percent the 50 percent that's ridiculous so I agree with you her level of English is way too low to be in this course she can't complete the program and I know when they graduate this this course they're supposed to be English teachers themselves it's supposed to be a high enough level that they go from being students to being teachers in one year so I said so what do want to can we set up remedial classes can we set up special sessions look you know I was offering to use some of my own time and I was asking this professor she can you say do you want a set of special special lessons help the student I think was pretty obvious from the other end of the phone that she didn't you know what I mean so this is my first thing about grading a lot of people come into this with cultural stereotypes and South Korea is really infamous for that if people like literally handing you a red envelope full of money to raise someone's great or putting pressure on you or something I think it's just important to think about the other people in the equation what they're trying to accomplish and what you're trying to accomplish for me I do grade generously when I assign grades to students I do try to be fair learn the other hand I actually do not judge the student based on their level of ability when they come into the classroom so in a sense that's that's an uneven scale that's making it easier for the students for the lower level so if I have a student who can just barely speak English who's much lower than the average of the students and they come in and give an oral presentation they prepared well they did a good original written composition they tried their hardest that were trying to pronounce the English clearly they made it they made a good effort relative to their level of ability they can get an 80 or 90 from me no problem and another student is at a very high level of ability in a sense I'm kind of normalizing that where you start out you could be a very high level ability and make no effort I have just I have just one student like that this year I have one student she's at a high level of ability she's the one who went to the provincial competition so the other professors picked her out as being especially good too and I think that what's her head but she would come in with like five words jot down or no prep at all no notes and would just kind of improvise some crap for her formal presentation for a formal oral exam it was like look you may be better off than half the other students but you know now this you didn't really answer the question you're not really living up to the criteria for the the assignments so you're getting a lower grade but I do rate generously because again I don't gain anything by giving students low grades and you have to ask yourself what are you calibrating your grading for what are you trying to measure one of the big differences so she's teaching children I'm teaching university students one of the big difference is how much time and effort you're putting into grading into evaluation so you want to design your whole course so that's effective so you're not wasting your own time because there's no point having a system where you're spending a lot of time making a measurement that's not not of any use to anyone it's not even used to students not even used to you but yeah fundamentally if I can give students a bunch of grades in the 80s and 90s I'm delighted to do that and I recognize I'm different from other professors a lot of professors come into this with their own emotional damage from their own experience as a student whether it was a high school university they feel like oh well if I could only get grades in the 70s when I was your age and university you should only be able to get grades in seven they have some like preconceived notion of what an A+ is and you got a you gotta leave that behind the dorm you like fundamentally what I look at the assignment I gave them and I do give very specific assignments so there's a list of things you know so they have to give a five-minute presentation they have to speak on this this this and this and I say look if they did everything the assignment asked to them they made a good effort then why shouldn't they get a hundred percent I don't give a hundred percent that often but like grades like 97 like you know they did everything in the assignment they made a couple mistakes or left out a couple things why shouldn't that be a grade in the 90s and old ultimately that's one of the ways you as a teacher can help them write assignments where it's really clear what its gonna mean to pass and what it's gonna mean to fail if you you know this assignment tells you what to do and they can do it and they can understand it and then you know I mean if if they totally fail to live up to the assignment they get a low grade but then most of the time you're gonna be giving them positive grades that again I think should reflect basically their effort and execution it shouldn't reflect the level of ability they're at before they came to your class anyway there's there's no point trying to measure that you can but there's no other if you do that then your grading scheme is just gonna be unequal and get more unequal then it's just whoever had a better education in high school before they became your student is getting a better grade alright enough about grading the second top of this video is class discipline which you also have to deal with um I had one semester here so I did two semesters to deflect Nemec year in the first semester I really forced everyone to not use their cell phones and to pay attention pay attention to me and to pay attention to the student speaking when students were doing presentations and in some ways that was very positive for a couple of the students it was traumatic because students who were breaking classroom discipline I would throw them out of the class normally I would do that there they're all female students all the problems for female students never with a male student so the females didn't have her cell phone and purse sitting on her desk and she'd be playing with her cell phone and talking to a friend and laughing or something being disruptive as well as not paying attention I would just take the purse and a cell phone and put in the hallway and say look if you don't want to study you don't have to be here you know you don't have to come to class and one student especially was really emotionally upset by that and you know she wrote me an apology letter later and stuff it was a big deal to her you know other students react in different ways I mean ultimately I don't care like I'm just trying to control the class and conduct the class and in some ways that kind of harsh discipline was really positive I can say for the mediocre students it meant they learned more and at a more positive classroom experience because otherwise and what I did this semester by contrast - I said to them look I don't need to force you guys to pay attention if you want to use your cell phones you can and what I've done this semester is I put the desks in the center of the lecture hall into a circle held with my class of 40 every every class there were nine students that are selected to sit in that circle and they're doing conversation practice they are getting more of my time and attention and I'm getting more of their time and attention and then for the other students I'm not enforcing class disappoint if they want to sit there and use their cell phone I'm ignoring that this semester but obviously not for the nine that are in the in the inner circle they should they should sharpen up and benefit more from the educational exercise we're doing in that class that day so and that method I've got to tell you it has advantages it really does we're using class time way more effectively I'm not spending my time and attention being punitive to other students I get to be more positive and encouraging but for the mediocre students it's a lot worse because they really become victims of their own limited attention span and they'd be getting a lot more out of the class if they just stood if they just sat there gazing at the chalkboard or gazing at whoever speaking whether it's me speaking of the student even they were just passively listening to the English being spoken they get a lot more out of it and I have a couple students where I recognize them I've known them for many months now where last semester they were really bright eyed and paying attention they were really good students in class and participate in this semester they're they're victims of their own short attention span some of them have the phone open Oh class and more commonly some of them get twenty minutes into the class or even sixty minutes into the class and then turn to their phone they've run out of they run out of gas through enough attention and in some ways I can respect that I don't hate or demonize the students do pay attention but it really is a big choice the bottom line is if you had two teachers working together you know two in tandem you could maintain a hundred percent discipline when you have one teacher working alone with 40 students then it's really an either/or choice because if I'm spending my attention being punitive and enforcing discipline and making people pay attention and these are these are basically adult students they're 20 and 21 years old you know and again even saying them look either study or get out you know either either participate positively or get it pay attention or get out then I'm not doing the other things I can be doing as a teacher she teaches more in the Japanese style which is to say there's one teacher and one translator so one native speaker of English one native speaker of Chinese that's the way the jet program works although in the jet program the native Japanese speaker has a much more active role but even then I mean sometimes you can win and sometimes you can't you have some class of students that are excellent but we had one experience where I we had taught the lesson before we taught one lesson with one class of kids and it went great and again it's not about how entertaining is so we in tandem taught I think it was you me and a translator I forget if it's translator Nam it was just you of me but with two of us we taught this lesson these kids and went great you know they recognized the educational value of it like the N if it was a good lesson they participated they were engaged they practiced the vocabulary and sentence structure items and then we taught the same lesson to a different class maybe the next day maybe just a few hours later or something and it was just awful the kids were just brats and they didn't pay attention and so on and I I can speak enough Chinese I was saying to them in Chinese look in this whole province there were like four native speakers of English that's maybe that's generous you know they're they're like eight white people but we might be the only ones who speak much at first I think we might be the only native speakers of English in this whole province there are some Dutch people who speak English okay but they're not native speakers how much oh no there's one of the couples case yeah there are four they're two Americans heroes are front oh there are four white people who speak English in the this whole province in dong and I said look they're only for foreigners you're speaking you got two of them in this classroom right now we're trying to help you this is really an opportunity for you and you're throwing it away you know what I mean and it's really a shame when the whole class is bad when the behavior is bad because some of those kids are capable of good work yes some of them just don't want to learn some of them just don't want to be there and I sympathize I know what it's like as a student to be forced into a position don't appeal but it's really a shame when the class as a whole when one part is dragging down the rest and so on and that is as I say that's really the question how much of your knee energy you're going to put in three weeks and that's basically negative policing the students and trying to compel them to pay attention or not misbehave and how much for energy you can put into something positive creative and really educational yeah in your situation at the college you can kick them out but that's true in my school you know the parents are paying for their kids to be there right no that's true say if you don't want to be here leave it's like you know the students are supposed to be there were kind of their guardians for the for this for these hours that they're at school so yes I think I have said that to them though like you know like if you don't wanna be a well yeah because they could sit in the corner or something you know if you just want to play video games on your phone get out like you can go sit over there they can't they can't leave the school thing but still yeah I have said that that kind of thing before yeah anyway so I gotta say both of these things both on grading and on school discipline I think my perspectives a little bit different I don't see the job of a teacher as being an entertainer I'm when I'm teaching I really I'm about communicating these vocabulary items the sentence structure whatever it is we're working on today and sometimes I do a lot of I do a lot of lessons that have historical content so there you know I did one lesson with your kids when you were absent and your boss was absent she called me in last minute to fill in and I taught them about the history of the English Industrial Revolution the Industrial Revolution in England and then that lesson again it's not like the kids were delighted they're like oh wow like this is a good lesson like thank you I'm like they learned a lot it was interesting it was engaging and you know we did simple stuff like the word coal CO al and what that is the version of the coal and industry and this kind of thing it was engaging for them but I'm not like a clown I'm not there to make them happy I think a lot of teachers do have an attitude that they're there to make these kids happy and that then your attitude is something totally different I can feel confident that what I'm teaching is worthwhile when I have a lesson like that it's good in terms of vocab grammar and also it has some kind of historical point it's something else in even if the kids are brats even if they don't respond positively and you know the other side of it is it was to make your kids happy if what you want to do is make people happy why why are you being a why are you why are you so reluctant to give them an 85 you don't mean why you reluctant to give them high grades giving them high grades could have a positive impact on their lives can pause them motivate them and so on design your assignments so that it is possible for the best students to get hundred-percent design your assignments in a way that's rewarding them in the most obvious way that doesn't make a clown out of you that doesn't trivialize what you're doing you know if you set up the obstacle course of the assignment in a way that they really can succeed and reward them without grades