Back in Guang’an: SSTers in the classroom and a visit to New Hope Deaf Training Center
The SSTers teaching in Guang’an are in their groove. Although their teaching schedules are changing from week to week, their work in the classroom has become almost routine. They are preparing lessons and working with students at various grade levels at Friendship Middle School’s upper and lower grades. They still teach a good number of evening classes, but are now also teaching morning (as early as 7:50 am) and afternoon time slots.
Today (November 5) we visited Friendship School again, and sat in on 8:40 am classes taught by Lee and Reuben and by Amanda and Sam. Lee and Reuben were doing a lesson on travel, using the sentence structure “If I could visit anywhere in China [or the world], I would visit _____, because ….” Students spent time composing their answers and then stood to read aloud when called upon. There were 74 tenth grade students in the classroom. Along the way, Reuben and Lee showed photos of places in the United States that they had visited or would like to visit.
Sam and Amanda were with an advanced group of senior students, whose English proficiency was quite high. The two SSTers gave a lecture on the typical daily routine of a U.S. high school student, explaining along the way differences and similarities with Chinese student life. Their presentation included an explanation of prom, and an oral English exercise in which the Chinese students had to create and present a dialog about asking someone to attend prom.
In the latter part of the morning we went across town and visited New Hope Deaf Training Center. (Two SSTers had teaching commitments throughout the morning and weren’t able to go along.) New Hope is a small school (19 students and 4 staff) who serve lower income families in the Guang’an area who cannot afford to send their children to a boarding school in a more distant city. All of the students have some limited hearing and hearing devices, and are between the ages of 2 and 7. The training center uses speech therapy to prepare the students to vocalize effectively so that they can enter public school at age 7. Unfortunately, if they were to use only sign language and not enter the regular school system here, their job opportunities in this part of China would be severely limited. Some students live at the school and others go home at night, depending how far away their home is from Guang’an city. We were accompanied to the school by Mr. Huang Gexin, a retired Guang’an city administrator who is an active advocate of the school and for people with disabilities more generally. (Since 2010 New Hope school has received financial support from the North American aid agency Mennonite Central Committee, support which allows families with limited means enroll their children.)
At noon we headed back to Friendship Middle School, met those who had been teaching, ate a huge noon meal (much more food than we expected came with the dinner we ordered), and then sat by the river at the outdoor tea house and talked, catching up on life in Gunag’an.
