ESL Anxiety in the P.R.C. ~ Amy Chen

I come within about a fraction of a second of shoving the podium I’m conducting class from behind straight through chubby Joey Xu whom is seated right in front of me and is pulling a classmate’s hair. The fact that someone has mentioned that he has a condition of sorts that is going to cut his life short flashes in my mind and I repent from my near rage. I notice Flora, an over-sexed fifteen-year old is sitting in the lap of one of her male classmates.

“Ah Flora…,” I start slowly, trying to shield her from embarrassment, “Ya know… Um…, that’s not allowed. Not in the classroom at least.”

“Wo keyi chi ne de dofu ma?” Jimmy Gao sitting to my right who is also fifteen asks me.

“Wo ting de dong nage juzi,” (I understand that sentence) I respond. “And no Jimmy, you can’t eat my tofu. That would be completely inappropriate. Ni ting de dong ma? (Do you understand?).

He shakes his head ‘no.’

There’s about fifty students in the class. Things are going from a dull roar towards chaos. I’ve got a bunch of things on my rostrum I’d brought from home to teach and/or review words.

“Cup,” I model the word holding up a cup.

“Cup,” a few students listlessly repeat.

“Smartphone,” I hold my phone up.

“Smartphone,” some kids repeat mocking me which unbeknownst to them is an effective language learning pronunciation method called ‘mimicry.’

“Ok, McLaren,” I call on one of the students. “Please make a sentence using ‘smartphone’.”

“I play a fun game on my smartphone,” he obeys my request.

“Do you want that to be past or present tense?” I ask him.

He looks confused.

“You need to say something like, “I am playing a fun game on my smartphone, or I played a fun game on my smartphone. And we won’t worry about the future tense today.”

“Oh, OK teacher, I know. I am playing a fun game on my smartphone,” he corrects his sentence.

“Very good McLaren!” I give him reinforcement. Then turn and mark a point on the whiteboard for his team which is Team A. “Alright Team A!” I congratulate them. “Come on Teams B, C, and D. You’re way behind,” I encourage them, deadpan.

Joey Xu is acting up again. He’s punching his classmate to his left in the shoulder. Flora is back in the lap of the male student. Things are getting loud.

“Quiet everybody,” I command as everyone ignores me.

“Quiet everybody!” A little louder. Still ignoring me.

“An jing ah!” Then, “AN JING AH!” And I take the ceramic coffee cup I had been using as a prop earlier and smash it straight down onto the podium breaking it and everyone is dead silent.

“Oh look,” I’m laughing. “I broke my favorite coffee cup.”

This teaching kids thing hasn’t been as wonderful as Ms. Li had told me it would be. My mind flashes to the scene in her office in which she was convincing me to teach at the middle school rather than the uni:

“It will be fun, the attached middle school students are excited to catch the opportunity to speak with an American born Chinese. They want to learn you accent. And they are always happy, not so serious as the college students. It will be easier, you only have fourteen hours a week,” Ms. Li had implored while trying to talk me into switching from Xiangxiang University to the on-campus middle school. The previous teacher at Xiangxiang University Attached Middle School had taken to spending entire classes sitting on a chair at the front of the room and doing nothing sometimes falling asleep. It’s amazing what you can get away with in China in some situations. He had carried on like that for the last part of the second semester.

I am seriously missing teaching college students. My nerves are shattered at the end of each work day. And everyday when I finish classes, I always go immediately to a pub that is run by a French teacher just off campus and have a big bottle of Harbin beer to calm down.

“Teach-ah,” Jimmy has taken to walking around, in, out, through the maze of desks, “You are so sexy.”

“Jimmy sit down!” I get good and authoritative. He keeps going, he’s kind of making a wider and wider circle of sorts working his way through the desks.

“Teach-ah I like you. I like you speaking.”

He is completely ignoring my orders working his way towards me.

“Teacher Amy, I, I want to…,” he’s negotiating the language. “I want to…, eat, to eat…, Ha! Ha! Eat teacher Amy dofu.”

“We say ‘tofu’ in English. And Jimmy, no, you definitely can’t eat my tofu.”

The classroom has gone completely out of control and now Jimmy is in my face.

“Teach-ah you are so sexy.” He sing-songs.

And at point blank range I scream directly into his ear, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

Then he is out the classroom door and I am behind him chasing him down a hallway. I actually find myself surprised and a little tripped out about what I am doing while running trying to catch him.

Then I run almost directly into my immediate supervisor, Annie Luo. I relay the previous few moments’ events to her.

“Oh…, just ignore him. He has a problem with his mind.”

“Really…?!” I am pissed. “Why didn’t somebody tell me about that before?!”