Jiabo Han: What Brings Me to Teaching

When I was at elementary school, I went to my grandparents’ home every summer vacation. They lived in a rural area then without various entertainment but only a TV with five or six channels. But it isn’t a big problem for children, how to kill time and have fun is their talent. At that time, I used to hang out with my three cousins, and we liked “role play”. For me, I was especially fond of acting as a teacher, and enjoyed teaching my young cousins what I had learned at school, drawing red checks or crosses on their written assignments or imitating my Chinese teacher's writing of the score “100”. I think it was during my childhood that the seed of to-be-a-teacher was rooted in my mind.

During my senior year of undergraduate university, I have been an intern English teacher at Xing Ning Middle School in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province. During the internship, I got the opportunity to teach an English class to grade seven, class six. It was the first time that I had taught a group of students aged 12 to 13. I prepared and designed each step of the class, and even wrote down each sentence I would say, and kept learner-centeredness in my mind and made each teaching step combine education with entertainment. Looking student’s enthusiasm in my class, I felt a wave of excitement came over me. However, the English teacher of this class (my guiding teacher) commented on my teaching, and said, “The classroom activities you designed are very creative, but sometimes the interaction between you and students is not good enough.” After that, I reflected it was partially because I lacked of the enough understanding of the psychology and the mindsets of this age group so that I was not good at guiding students deeper thinking. Obviously, I still have a long way to go.

When I was a postgraduate student at Northeast Normal University, I have attended a lecture about culture difference, in which our foreign teacher Erica has introduced us the term -- power distance, and illustrated it by an example. She said, “...Students in western countries are brave to challenge their teachers in the class, while Chinese students, like you guys, are used to keeping silence.” At that time, I realized this phenomenon and could not help thinking my study experience before. It is true that traditional teachers in China, especially those in primary and secondary education, give students less opportunity to express their own ideas in order to emphasize teachers’ power. Under this kind of guidance and education, some Chinese students just recite and repeat what they have learned which leads to their ability of viewing an issue critically gradually weakening. How to maintain teachers’ authority without sacrificing students’ creative thinking ability? As a prospective English teacher, this question is what I am going to face and solve, and I am eager to find some clues in the real western academic atmosphere. 

Now, I come to UIC, specializing in education. My career goal is to be an English teacher in a secondary school in my hometown. I hope I can use the knowledge I will learn here to help all my future students love to rather than have to learn English.