Crystal
An English as a Foreign Language teacher, China
2 June 2020
My life before Covid-19
I work as an English language teacher in a High School in a small city in a mountainous area of one province in China. It’s a boarding school and most of the students come from farming backgrounds and live at the school. They are chosen for their academic excellence. My school has a long history and a great reputation. Last year over 3,000 of our students went to university and 1,000 of those students got in to key universities. I teach two classes with 64 students in each class aged 15-16 years old. I work long hours starting at 6.40 am and not finishing until about 10.00 pm. Because it’s a boarding school, the students also study until 10.00 pm. One concern I have is that because of the long teaching day and the fixed syllabus, “my students don’t have time to learn beyond the classroom”. Our teaching is very exam oriented, but I really want to encourage my students to read more authentic texts outside of school. This is difficult for them because of the long school hours and the amount of classwork.
How my life has changed as a result of Covid-19
For us, lockdown started on 22nd January. I found the lockdown a relaxed experience. I live with my husband, daughter, father-in law and mother-in law. Normally I have to go to school every morning, afternoon and evening, even if I have no lessons, but during lockdown I only had to teach every other day and the rest of my time I could arrange as I wanted. Although I say I was working at home, actually during lockdown I worked at school. I had to go in and deliver my lessons in an empty classroom online. The students could see their classroom and what was going on outside the classroom window. “It’s strange, but I think the teacher can find more passion because standing in front of the board you are familiar with everything”. Although my lessons at school are 40 minutes, for online teaching they were longer – one and a half hours every other day, so my working time seemed shorter.
We can have our life at last! [Before] we did not have our life, just work!
They say that what your life is during the lockdown indicates your life in the future after you retire and I am quite satisfied with my retirement situation! I have become an expert in the kitchen.
I enjoyed doing [online teaching] because I have my life but at the same time I worried about the effectiveness.
The students have important mid-term exams in May and this was a worry. My students are teenagers and require a structured learning environment. They seemed to lack self-control and had problems with self-discipline even though they are top students. Parents also had concerns, for example one mother told me that her daughter had locked herself in her room and wasn’t doing lessons or homework and the mother didn’t know how to deal with it. I worried about my students’ eyesight – some students used computers, but most used their mobile phones and it’s a small screen for learning. Students only relied on the recordings of the lessons. The screenshots they take are forever stored in the computers and not in their minds. In online teaching I missed the opportunity for pair work and group work. I didn’t do this in online teaching. “I missed that part of my lesson, but I didn’t find a way to do it [online]”.
On May 13th the lockdown ended and we went back to school as normal and on May 27th the students had their mid-term exams, but the results were not as good as expected.
One thing I found strange was that it’s a good school with many traditions, but actually for this lockdown I don’t think the school prepared us or gave us enough support. “We didn’t get any training for online teaching. No one shows us what to do”. The school has very high expectations of us. They assumed we could do it. The teachers all tried their best to live up to these expectations.
We had to survive by ourselves.
For survival we asked for advice from each other, “we just had to depend on each other not from the administration of the school”. It was stressful, but I got used to it.
Emerging opportunities
I feel that the pandemic was an opportunity for my students to learn outside the classroom; beyond the syllabus. They didn’t need to follow a strict timetable.
Now students have more ideas about how to learn on their own and at their own pace and not just stick to what the teacher tells them in class.
This has been one of my concerns from before and so this is a real opportunity now. Of course some did find it difficult without a structure and most are happy to return to school. The COVID situation was also “an opportunity for me to get to know my students well”. I have a big class and normally my lesson is only 40 minutes long, and most of the time I just stand and deliver the lesson, but in online teaching I could use the chat discussion and some of the quieter students became very vivid. One girl who is normally very shy in class was always the first to give a response on chat. Back at school now, the students tell me that they felt safe behind the screen. The online teaching made me know my students.
I never know, I never thought that they have another personality.
Since we’ve been back at school, I have noticed a little change in the atmosphere. I think the situation has opened students’ minds to talk to the teachers. Our school was worried that after spending so much time with their digital devices at home, they may struggle. We had to have talks with each student one-to-one and
because of these talks that we get to know each other and maybe because of the talks we care about them and then in class they show a better atmosphere.
My role as a teacher has changed. I now have 20 students who I supervise and this is the first time for me to talk in this way with my students. The students “get to know that teachers not only do the job, but really care about them”. I enjoy this new aspect of my job, but it’s not easy and I cannot always do long talks because time is so limited, so for some students it’s just a case of filling in a form that the school requires and trying to arrange a time later to listen to them.
My fears and hopes for the future
Working at home was very cosy and convenient, but there is no possibility now to continue working flexibly. My school is a good school with a long history and traditions and so it’s difficult to change. I think that online teaching may become a trend and if I have a chance in the future to be an online teacher, I don’t mind as the lockdown experience has helped me to prepare.