Drop Kicked Into the Deep End

Stephanie lands in China on a Tuesday. By Thursday she's standing in front of five classes at a public school, making it up as she goes, with no Chinese and a stack of Xerox copies. Friday she's at a completely different school with air conditioning and colored walls.

Then 40 seven-year-olds say "hello, teacher" all at once - and something clicks. About teaching. About language. About how she'd been going about all of it wrong her whole life.

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:32 Drop Kicked
• 01:10 The Taxi Cards
• 01:48 Public School Thursday
• 02:28 Experimental School Friday
• 03:05 A, A, Apple, Apple
• 04:02 Hello, Teacher
• 05:18 You Make It Fun
• 06:44 Where I'd Gone Wrong
• 08:10 Until Next Time

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, I'm Stephanie Arapian, and this is the Centered Creator Podcast. I tell stories from my creative life, my travels, my many questionable decisions, and what I've learned about being human along the way.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

This one starts with 40 kids chanting the alphabet in perfect unison and ends with me realizing I'd been going about language learning completely wrong my whole life. That first week in China, I got dropkicked into the deep end. Like it was insanity. And I loved it. And I ended up staying a lot longer than I thought I would. But that first week kind of did me a doozy. There was a whole bunch of travel chaos that first day I time traveled within 48 hours of landing. And I had two back-to-back experiences in the classrooms. It's a big, loud, urban city. It's the capital of a province. It's loud noises and chaos and like crazy traffic rules. Not driving in China, especially not a motorbike. And figuring out my way, they literally give you on your very first day as a teacher these little cards that have the opinion and the characters of different locations in the city on them. So you can kind of hand them to a taxi driver, and that's how you will get around. Eventually I learned to say these things. There were some drawbacks to that particular method too, but it helped a lot. I arrived on Tuesday, on Thursday, I was being thrown into one school, a public school, which was so stereotypically concrete, cement, open windows, yet had electricity with an open water fountain wash station in the hallway, and open windows with no AC and no heating and no nothing, but it had electricity because there were TVs. And the next day on Friday, I was given to an experimental school, which meant that they probably had private money. They had air conditioning and heating and all the technology and the pretty new colored paint walls and lovely floors and all those things. They had similar aspects in that both schools, all schools, have calisthenics in the morning. And that is how I learned to count to eight in Chinese. But what I learned on my first couple of days there, the first day in the public school was chaotic. And I was being thrown into where the teacher had left off in their lesson plans. And I was kind of making up as I go, I had five different classes that were all in the same thing, making all the Xerox copies, trying to get through the material and figuring out what do they know? This is my first experience on my own in a classroom where I'm not student teaching. And then the immediately next day, I started understanding my place in the system. Because as I'm walking down the hallway to my classroom, I start hearing in very young voices, all in unison, A, A, Apple, Apple, B, B, banana, banana, C, C, cat, ket. And I'm like, huh. Okay, that makes sense. They're learning the vocabulary and their letters. Okay. And then I come into the classroom and the lovely Chinese teacher introduces me, and I tell the whole class, hello. And they're all like, hello, Tita! All in unison, all at once. And there's like 40 kids in this classroom, and they're all like seven, eight years old. And it's bright and it's sunny, and it's it's like a beautiful classroom, and it's lovely. They're all shining faces, very disciplined, all staring at me with like, and so my follow-up question, as per usual, would be, How are you today? And everybody, again, in unison, I'm fine, thank you, and you. And it just became so clear they had no clue what they were saying, no idea. It was a rote response. And that's fair. That's exactly how you learn a language. And when I think about learning Chinese myself, that is one major method of learning difficult concepts, is the repetition and drilling down. And I was there to make it more real. I was there to help them understand what they were actually trying to say. Because I was a person that they were not going to be able to communicate with in their own language. Like, period, did not speak Chinese when I arrived there. I was getting good at numbers, though. What do you do in that situation? You make it fun. And that's good for adults too. Just saying now. If you can gamify anything in your life that you want to learn, that you want to become a habit, that you want to break a habit, that you're trying to change your mindset around, gamify. Woo-hoo. I was working with children. So we had a lot of games. We had a lot of on-the-chalkboard kind of games. We had some little bit of running around the room games, not a ton, because you know the teachers didn't like that very much. There were a lot of relay races, either sitting down or going to the board or back. They would win tiny pieces of candy or a little soft drink. I was using bribes. I'll be honest. I was using bribes. Like, come on, let's be real. That's what you do. But I realized that I was there to make them understand what it was out of this academic context. And that was one of the first times it became clear to me where I had gone wrong in my own language learning was the constant tests, the grammar, the perfectionism of making sure the sentence is perfect, that I knew all the vocabulary, that I could finish all the tests, that I could write and read and do all the things. And we have very, I'm not sure how to verb this, academized, made scholarly the art of learning a language instead of a function that communicates. Like people talk to each other. That's all we gotta do. And if you can make yourself understood, done. Done. Don't worry about the grammar. Don't worry about the using the wrong words. Don't worry about mere pronunciation. If you have made the other person understand what you want or what you're trying to say, fantastic. That's it. That's the goal. And that actually put a lot of pressure off of me. Like, I can't expect any seven-year-old to pass the SAT English test. Do we still teach the SATs anymore? I don't think so. Oh my god, I'm dating myself again. I can't expect a seven-year-old to pass the TEFL exam. And it took a lot of pressure off of myself as well to learn a new language. I didn't have to speak perfectly. I still kind of wanted to. But if I was making myself understood, then I was achieving my goal.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Until next time, take care.