Talks With My Students—-Rob
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Rob is one of my senior students. He is a special student to me, not because of his big title and his job, but his common touch personality. And his maners and words have totally changed my mind on European cockiness.
The bad memory is still in my mind.
The French senior supervisor of a France company who was my student for one lesson. Just one lesson, then we finished our teaching contract. Before being his mandarin teacher, he was my interviewer, and I were his interviewee. He seemed more like a boss, I were like the one who searching a job from him. We had an interview at the lobby of Radisson. He checked my resume strictly, then he asked me a few questions to test me if I were qualified to be his mandarin tutor, finally with his nod as an end. It sounded unbelievable that I could pass an extremely strict senior supervisor’s face to face interview. I swear I will not do any of these any more. The second was the first lesson with him. At first, it was a good start, but then he was not a so nice person, he didn’t care about the culture which he thought he knew all of them or he felt not important to his life here. So boring of him, wasn’t he? How could you not care what happen around you? On another aspect, I were not a full-experienced teacher at that time. It was my fault!
Thanks to all my experiences, without each oppotunity, I can’t be as confident as today.
The each talk with Rob was so interesting and meaningful.
I would like to write one by one.
One of the latest talks was about Chinese characters.
My view on teaching Chinese is totally different from most of the mandarin teachers. Survival first! Characters except some survival ones are not recommended to learn until the students have enough energy or knowledge to start, otherwise I will teach them the first thing first.
I taught Rob the rough idea about Chinese characters at the beginning. The pictographic characters, picto-phonetic characters, indicative characters and associative characters are the four main categories of Chinese characters. I wrote
1.
2. 
3.
4. 
1. 日，(rì) sun
2. 月，(yuè) moon
3. 山，(shān) mountain
4. 水，(shuǐ) water
for him to let him know why we called pictographic characters. And then I wrote
1.
2.
3.
1. 上，（shang) up, above
2. 下, (xia) down, under
3. 四, (sì) four
to explain what are the indicative characters to him. I combined this part with the description on time which was created by myself. I am always so confident when I explain my Time Zone to all my students to make them clear about the different culture background from the understanding of “shang” and “xia” using in time between China and west. Then I say in a way ilustrated with river flowing from up to down in the river bed which has the same concept like time river flowing from “shang” (the past) to “xia”(the future), that’s why we have the words “shangge xingqi”, “shangge yue” for the last week and last month, ”xiage xingqi”, ”xiage yue” for the next week and next month. Not bad ha! 
I like the imaginative way I used to teach or entertain to my fellow students. Have fun together and learn the language and culture at the same time. It’s not easy job! And I to face some problem during my teaching.
