mind your voice

“How’s my class?” Melissa asked when I walked in. “Last week they told me that they made you mad.” I didn’t remember being upset, but the office probably remembered Nana’s whirlwind return yesterday, steaming mad and muttering invectives in Chinese under her breath. The episode ended with her curt dismissal of a student who had trailed her back to the English Department office and Nana’s Mandarin declaration of general temperance disorder before exiting in a similar flourish. Nana is the youngest and most fashionable English teacher of the department, which weigh into her bubbly and outgoing personality that has been so helpful to me these last few weeks. If she could be driven temporarily mad by her students, well, perhaps Andrew could be too (although granted, Andrew does not seem to suffer from the piques and fits that young Chinese women of a certain fashionable lifestyle seem to).

But Andrew cannot remember exactly which class Melissa is referring to that might have caused him similar grief. For the first weeks every class seemed to blend together: twelve session of 50 ninth graders, each of them wearing the same blue school uniform, made distinguishing each class’s peculiarities and quirks very difficult, and their behavior seemed to all be one mass murmur of general controlled chaos. This has suited my teaching style, as I can deal with a certain amount of energy in the classroom so long as I am able to channel and direct it with activities of my own design (and this loud drum major baritone doesn’t hurt either – Tu My, those little girls are sometimes so forward as to proclaim to me that my voice is beautiful to their ears; you had better quickly launch one of your insults my way to make sure my ego stays where it should). As I’ve said before, for some reason Chinese students seem enthralled by loud voices – the girl teachers among us CTLCers seem to have more trouble controlling their kids than us guys who can project our voices more resonantly. According to my students, a “powerful voice” gives an impression of, well, power, and since I can boom out instructions without seeming to actually yell punitively, the kids were duly behaving themselves.

But as time has gone by, some brats have become emboldened and some slower students have tuned out. The latter I am sometimes able to coax back into cooperation with some quickly whispered words in Chinese, but a second development, this time in the English Department office, has guaranteed more difficulties with both groups: with the urgent shadow of the high school entrance examinations hovering over every 9th grade student and teacher’s head, the other English teachers have requested that I assist them in covering book and listening exercises from their own textbooks and class materials that they themselves have no time to get to. While the preference among foreign teachers is to design our own lesson plans, my contract states that I must stick to school curriculum when asked to do so, so I gave it a shot.

These circumstances led to the first time I lost control of my voice.

This week’s lesson plan – on movies and genres – would be relegated to the remaining class time after first going over the textbook’s speaking lesson and the listening comprehension activity, I told each class. My formerly rambunctious and eager pupils let out collective moans of resignation and protest as they pulled out their hated English textbooks. The original speaking lesson was reprehensible, but as long as I could do the instructing, I could salvage something useful and entertaining for the students – but the listening comprehension portion turned out to be my Achilles heel.

“Just play them the tape,” advised Nana and Hu Laoshi. “The audio file has instructions and English sentences that they will have to recognize.” In principle this seems idyllic for a teacher – sit back and relax for ten minutes while an audio tape does the teaching for you! – but the students hated it and without my helmsmanship each class quickly devolved. On the last class of Thursday, five boys in the front did not have their materials and instead settled for making as much noise as they could. Among them were a few who did not understand my English instructions and made up for their insecurities by being little punks and steadfastly ignoring everything I said, modeled, mimed or translated for them. After half an hour of their disrespectful mischief I amped up my baritone in their direction with a stern direction to be quiet – but did not realize that I had already turned the dial as high as it could go. “BE QUIET,” I thundered and pointed, “AND DO NOT SPEAK WHILE I AM TALKING.” The class hushed immediately and in the quiet I was startled to notice that my throat rasped. I was beginning to lose it – but not so much as I did when one of the boys in offense threw his head back and imitated my yelling by cackling like a hyena.

“SHUT UP,” I yelled at him. He quieted.

I turned back to the rest of the class and continued the lesson like nothing had happened, but my throat was seriously hurting now and despite my nonchalant teacher facade I was breaking a sweat and feeling fairly piggish, especially about having just told one of my students to shut up. The other, more obedient students in the class continued as if nothing was wrong and in fact later they all swarmed me after class with yet more rock-star entreaties for the foreign teacher celebrity, but I felt hot and ashamed, a failure of a teacher and not worthy of their misplaced respect and admiration. I tried going to the boys and speaking to them in Chinese. They seemed a bit rattled and wary of me, and I do not know if they understood my bad attempts to tell them in Chinese that I just wanted them to try as hard as they could even if they were not able to completely do everything I asked them to. The swarm of obedient student-fans followed after and blocked me from them though, and seemingly from among them their head teacher materialized in front of me with a bemused look on her face.

“These boys like to talk, don’t they?” she asked me with a smile in Chinese. I blushed and stammered in bad Chinese yes, a little, it seems. “They can be very naughty,” she added, looking at them. I was abashed. She had probably heard my yell through the walls and the windows. Perhaps the whole school had. Before I could say much more in either explanation, defense, or apology, the throngs of student-fans crowded around to coo at my Chinese and to pester their head teacher if she could speak English as well as I could. She batted them away again with a bemused expression and I scooted out of their fast.

Along the way back to the office many students did the “Hello Teacher” bow and gaggles of giggling girls fell over each other when I passed, making me just feel worse. All of this misplaced adoration was certain to dissipate as soon as I yelled at them next, or as soon as somebody told them of the incident that had just happened, I thought. I returned to the English office where some of the other English teachers were working quietly, but I did not storm in as Nana had done. I sat at my desk and stared at the textbook lesson and my Excel spreadsheet of a curriculum for half an hour, silent and still. Perhaps later my colleagues will pick up on my mannerisms and know when I am (actually) upset, but for now – especially with Nana’s dramatic flourishes covering me – I was left alone.

It seemed like a crack in my voice could shatter the feeling of security that I had nestled into here. The goodwill and generosity of my Chinese acquaintances is, I realized, largely dependent on my behavior, and if I seem to be a bad teacher, I may damage that goodwill. I spent the evening brooding in my room in front of my computer.

Then a somewhat overwhelming thing happened.

In America we often use AIM and Gchat to instant message each other, but in China the popular service for the same is called QQ. I had installed it to speak to the other English teachers, but a few students had figured out how to find me through it and happily assaulted me with internet chat questions in broken English. This had been happening since the first week to some low degree, with my having to occasionally handle conversing with a student once every evening, perhaps.

That evening would be different – one of them leaked my screenname to his friends, maybe? – because soon I was dealing with a barrage of student requests and invitations. They popped up on my screen one after the other, almost overloading my computer. In an hour I was juggling no fewer than fifteen conversations at once with my students. Upon seeing the pace of my responses become slower and slower, a few enterprising ones eventually started a group chat, where I could speak with all 70 of the students assembled on the Internet at once.

“Teacher, we heard you were not very happy today,” one chirped.
“Do not worry about Class 9 – they are a very naughty class,” another one supplied.
“My name is MonkeyRay,” offered another.

So it went, for hours until midnight when my students eventually went to sleep (”WAH there is a chemistry test tomorrow everybody we have to go to bed!”). I was cheered considerably. If you’re ever in a bad mood, it helps to be treated like a rock star, it turns out. Dunno what the movie stars are complaining about.

The next morning I approached my class with the resolve to not let things get out of hand again. With a sterner approach and more preemptive discipline on my part, things went much more smoothly, even despite the aggravating lesson plan additions that I had to incorporate (although they are still taking up the majority of my lesson time, leaving little room for the actual movie and genre lesson itself – something I will have to discuss and argue with the English teachers later). In the hours and days since I became upset with those boys I have gone from wondering about whether I am currently a deserving teacher to wondering how I will be like as a parent. Hopefully I learn a few things now before I let my kid turn into one of those pesky boys.

I should probably go find some cough drops, too. It’ll be a long year. Teachers and teachers-in-waiting: do you have any advice for this, haha, impostor?