A Note On Levels

Last week's lesson - Dragons' Den - highlighted an issue I've been meaning to post about - the question of levels.

Chinese middle schools generally cover six years which are called Junior 1, Junior 2, Junior 3, Senior 1, Senior2 and Senior 3. That is, grades 7 to 12. In my experience schools seldom have foreign teachers for Junior 3 and I have never heard of a school having a foreign teacher at all for Senior 3: they are too busy preparing for University entrance exams.

It should be easy, shouldn't it? You know the ages of the students and you know the grade levels and you can prepare accordingly. Sadly, this is China, and life is never that simple.

The levels of students within a grade, even within a class, can vary to a degree that you will initially find astonishing. In my Junior 1 (Grade 7) classes last year I had some students who could barely understand "what is your name"* and other students who could hold a perfectly sensible conversation on topics as diverse as environmentalism and whether Penny and Leonard would stay together in The Big Bang Theory. This year I have no juniors. I have only grades 11 and 12 - Senior 1 and 2 - and the spread of ability is exactly the same for my Senior 2 classes as it was for my Junior 1 classes. 

The difference is that for junior one the bell curve was skewed to low end and for Senior 2 it's skewed to the high end but it's still a bell curve for all that.

So how did that impact on this Dragons' Den lesson plan.

I had prepared the lesson intending to teach it to both Senior levels with just slight amendments to the level. I started with Senior 2 students and it was obvious within minutes that I wouldn't succeed. The introduction - eliciting the meaning of "business" and a few examples didn't take five minutes: it took more than ten. The instructions written on the board were, as far as the class seemed to understand, incomprehensible gibberish. We covered less than half the planned work. 

In between lessons I scribbled down a slightly simplified version. It was still too hard for the next class. Virtually no one was able to complete a task that I considered suitable for several grades lower.

At lunch time I revamped the whole thing coming up with version two. All the same, in the afternoon at my other school, teaching a class that is ostensibly a grade lower I went with the original version. They sailed through it easily, completing everything, including the offers of finance and the accepting or rejecting of those offers.

So for the rest of the week the higher level got the really dumbed down version of the lesson while the lower level got the harder and more interesting version.

And that's the way it will have to be from now on - Senior Two will get lessons that are, in my opinion suitable for Junior 1 and Senior 1 will get lessons that I think should be for Senior 2.

Assuming anything about the levels is a big mistake.

(*Even the lowest students can take part in this conversation

 How are you?

I'm fine thanks, and you.

I'm fine too.

But they have learned it the way parrots learn to say "Polly wants a cracker", without any actual understanding. It isn't learning so much as it's a Pavlovian response to stimulus.)