Bravo AMonk. I think what Steve is alluding to is the need for a more humanistic approach. This old teacher-student thing may have its place in some or even many situations, but in terms of second language learning it seems that "I'm the teacher, you're the student" doesn't work that well. Guiding, facilitating and participating seem to work a lot better. But really I'm just stating the obvious; however, it seems that China is full of FT's who in their headlong rush and/or desire to become English teachers, coupled with the need to actually be good at it, draw up on their past experiences as students and basically mimic the "I am teacher method" which they're familiar with. What's worse is that only a small minority of them show a desire to hone their skills or improve their classroom presence.

I work at a university where we have over 20 FT's. About 75% of them are first time teachers of varying ages. I've seen their lecture style approach and cringed as I see them slowly lose their students. The administration won't address this as an issue; their blinders are firmly in place and all they see is the cash flow and the white faces. In fact, teachers who actually get it and whose teachings manifest that awareness, are often treated with the disrespect that comes from leaders who know that they themselves do not get it and yet are loathe to acknowledge the reality of that.

Oh well, Steve, it seems, is a rare bird indeed. Too bad there aren't more like him.

True enough Raoul; teaching classes filled to the max with children can lead to a situation where crowd control takes precedence over actually teaching them anything useful.

What I found to be quite useful when I took my first middle school assignment in China, and discovered that most of my classes were filled with around 70 students, was to first establish some ground rules. However, this meant that from the get go I had to make it quite clear to the administration and staff - from the principal on down, that I couldn't and wouldn't function in this environment unless said rules were understood by all. I wrote the rules out clearly, and in addition made it quite clear that there would be consequences if the rules weren't followed. Chief among those consequences, if all else failed, was that I would simply walk out of the class. The principal, at my request, instructed all of the Chinese teachers, who of course taught the same students, to read the rules to them and when necessary to translate them into Chinese.

At the first, sending students outside of the classroom for the entire period was a real shocker for everyone, even though I had told them it would happen. You can imagine the stir it created when it was noted that there were about 10 boys standing outside my class. Later, if anyone was asked to leave, it became a funny situation for the rest of the class. They started to follow my lead from prior days when I would say, "bye, bye now" in a lilting almost mocking voice. Whenever I ordered a student out, the whole class, in unison, would sing out "bye, bye" and I didn't even have to do it anymore. No one wanted to be on the receiving end of that, and so eventually I never had to send anyone out. Moreover, we actually managed to get things done and the students actually found themselves making progress that they could take pride in.

Of course, as noted above, I had the principal on my side. Not all administrators are as receptive to change - the standard being that our job as foreign teachers is to entertain the rug rats and leave it at that. Empowering teachers to actually teach, and enabling them to establish the discipline to actually do so is definitely not the norm. However, this was a public middle school in a very poor part of China where the parents had to scrimp and save in order to send their children to school. Naturally, they didn't want their money wasted and the kids knew that. The kids also knew that their parents would be informed if they misbehaved - or, at least they believed that would happen anyway.

Leaving that job was one of the hardest things I've ever done. There were tears all around - including my own. Some of those kids will always be in my heart. I never imagined that I could pull it off with students of that age group. (My prior experience had been with adults and international students in America and college students in China.) But the memories of that time period will never leave me, and the relationships I established will always be extremely meaningful.

So, my suggestion is that teachers who find themselves in a situation like the above, should take the bull by the horns. And they should do so before signing a contract. Make it quite clear to the decision makers that you have criteria that must be adhered to or you will simply go elsewhere. I realize that this may sound idealistic to some; however, to those who believe that, I would suggest that compromising your own values is not worth the few kwai offered to you so that you can simply be a clown who's just marking time until the next job pops up.

OK, how many kids in that filled up room?
Have you actually empowered the teacher to do anything to control the class, or is your school so terrified of the parents (ie cash-bearing ultimate customers) that the teacher has no real hope of enforcing basic classroom behavior?

It's possible that the well-educated teacher just doesn't connect well with a classroom full of kids. It's not a common gift; not everyone can do it. The real secret of teaching here seems to be having the students like you...if they like you you can get away with murder, and if they don't like you then you're not going to make it even if you're God's Gift To Teaching. This is true with kids as much as it is with everyone else.

But it's also possible that the class just isn't manageable... at least not by people coming in with Western viewpoints, and especially not by people not trained specifically in teaching kids. An awful lot of kids' classrooms here are just hopelessly chaotic; few Western teachers arrive here knowing how to cope with that. We tend to arrive in China expecting to teach; in many cases teaching gets quickly shoved aside in favor of simple crowd control. It's awfully hard to deliver a good class under such conditions.

So, please don't automatically blame the teacher alone for all the problems. If you haven't already, you might want to think about the classroom environment you're putting the teacher into, also.