Around the beginning of the term, I got asked/told to be in charge of the Year 10 activity for the school’s English Activity Day. It’s taken a while to sort out what this entails, when it will be held, etc. But last night we had our first meeting (as in, Monday morning Nelson said, “Rachel, we need to have our first meeting. It will be tonight at 7:30. Can you get all the students together?”)
Year 10 is going to have a debate: ten students from class 5 (the top class) will debate ten students taken from the other seven classes. The meeting went pretty well, given that it was last minute, only 25 minutes long, and half my students still aren’t really sure what “having a debate” even means. We need to decide on a debate topic by Thursday though. Ideas tossed around at the meeting include how much should we sacrifice the environment for economic gain? Should China continue to pursue hydroelectric power? (I really like that one.) Nelson tossed out the question of whether, as a Chinese school, BGY is too Westernized. The kids panned that pretty quickly as a really lame idea. Class 5 is really on about doing something social, and really want to talk about whether we should respect gay people. That was a surprising topic to come up. We’ll see if it pans out though, as several other students are decidedly uncomfortable talking about gay things.
It all went well until the very end when Nelson, bless his little Chinese teacher instinct, stood up and announced to the class, “I just want you all to realize how important this activity is. December 8th is the activity fair, and your debate will be at 1:30, the most important part of the day. It is when the most people will be there, and your debate will be in the school theater, the biggest room in the school. Visitors, international guests, principals, your teachers, your parents, and classmates will all be in the audience. Thank you.”
I had a mini-meeting with five students after this to assure them that this was not that big of a deal, that they would all do really well, that nothing bad would happen, that there would not be thousands of people watching, that everything would be okay. So silly.
Interestingly, lots of the Western teachers have commented on the sort of farcical nature of these “English activity days”, with highly contrived speeches, and performances, and so on, all designed to show off how well our students speak English, even if they’ve just memorized a speech half-written by someone else. Selina, probably my best student, voiced exactly the same complaint, regarding Nelson’s it-is-very-important-you-do-well-in-front-guests speech, saying, “I always feel like I’m an advertisement for this school.”
