This is the first teaching situation I had in China. I was placed in a middle school in a minor Chinese city in Hubei province. A big place by western standards, it is considered small by the locals and other Chinese. There are six years of middle school. I taught the lowest grade and two classes of the highest. I really enjoyed teaching English and have a good rapport with my four classes of eleven to twelve-year olds and gained some respect from my two classes of eighteen-year olds. I taught the little ones three times a week and the Seniors once. The young ones were taught from a book and I drilled them in pronunciation then they did written exercises which I corrected as they finished. If the class worked quickly I tried to fit in a word game or something else to increase the breadth of their experience. The Seniors are really amazingly good at everyday English but needed challenge in full comprehension. Their knowledge of grammar is probably better than mine and I think I was brought in not only to let them hear a native English speaker but to give them (again) a broader experience of the language. I decided that the best way I could extend their understanding and appreciation of the English language was to expose them to short pieces of high quality writing, mainly poems. This was not successful and that was a mystery to me until I had enough experience in the culture to understand some of the deficits of the Chinese education system. You can find my ideas on my Bloggerparty blog about it. I led them through a process of responding to and analyzing the poem. I started with “The Stolen Orange” by Brian Patten. Three teachers and a student teacher sat in and they loved it. Next week I will do Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Taken” (true title, the other is an excerpt). I really enjoyed researching and analyzing the poems to prepare. A couple of really bright students enjoyed the exercises and so did the teachers but students who had been encouraged to repeat teachers opinions and pass exams through regurgitation of memorized material were ill-equipped to think for themselves and look for the meaning under the text. My good idea was a failure. What could have been a popular class exercise in a Western educational setting was a big flop here. Don’t try it if you come to China.