Magical Tongue Party

Sometimes I think of teaching in China as just a job. It's just a way to make some money so we can enjoy life in Shanghai. But that's what I always think about teaching, until I'm actually doing it, until I'm actually in front of the class, interacting with young people with interesting lives and elastic brains, which is when I remember just how much I love it (and love getting paid for something so easy and enjoyable).

My students are charming. They are all first-year master's students at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics with majors like investment banking, sports marketing, and public accounting. They know way more than I do about these things, but their English is not very good. That's why they take "Communicative English" as an elective.

Most Chinese students have been studying English since they were about 12. Some learned from foreign high school or college teachers, but most learned from heavily accented English-speaking Chinese teachers. Most of their native-English exposure comes from shows like Prison Break, which they watch voraciously on bootlegged DVDs with the subtitles on. For many of them, I am the first native-English speaking teacher they've ever had.

Most of my students have English names, a tradition most foreign language classes have. Just like I was Pilar throughout high school Spanish. Their English names become their alter-ego and some keep the same name from middle school, while others change their English names every year as their interest in pop-culture changes and their self-esteem changes. Here is a short, but representative list of some of my students' names:

Agnes

Ivy

Yolanda

Eleven

Young King

Nancy

Doris

Cherry

Rainy

Shiny

Shinysun

Simba

Yo Yo

Rink

Alfred

Knight

Chaucer

Silence

Devil

Happy Baby

I try my hardest not to ever call on Shinysun or Happy Baby, because I can't say them without laughing. Some students had never had to choose an English name and wanted me to name them. They all want something meaningful, but I told them that English names don't mean much. They ask what Jennifer means and I tell them it was the most popular name in 1979 and also the name of the main character in a popular movie in the late-70s, and that it doesn't mean anything. Sometimes I ask them to tell me their Chinese name and I pick the name that sounds closest to it in English. Pei Pei became Peggy, etc. But one student really wanted a "meaningful" name, so I asked him what he was interested in. He said money, so I named him Rich, which I said was a common English name but also meant wealthy. The next week he came to me saying that while Rich was a nice name, he had decided to go by BMW instead. Another student whose Chinese name means "time," is thrilled with his new name, "Eon," which I am quite proud of myself and think is a very cool name.

For one of our first assignments, I had my classes choose a new class name. This was a marketing exercise and a way to get them to creatively collaborate ("brainstorm" was one of their vocab words), but I also told them that I didn't think that "Communicative English" was very indicative of what the class was about. So they had to choose a name that would effectively convey what the class meant to them. I told them we would use the name every week to refer to the class. This was also a way for me to distinguish between my four identical class full of forty identical faces and identically ridiculous names. The assignment was mostly a success. It enabled me to hear some of their goals for learning English this semester and the importance of English they anticipated in their professional lives.

My favorites were Mouthstorm, English Dream Studio, and the Magical Tongue Party, but I was out-voted in every class and now I am the proud instructor of English PIE (Participation, Improvement, and Enjoyment...and because pie is tasty and makes us feel good), the J-Zone (named after a popular China Mobile ad campaign...of course the J stands for Jennifer, whose personal life they seem to care more about than learning English because I am the only foreigner most of them have ever known), 304 (our classroom number...no marketing majors in that class, but I think it's catchy like a product number or something...very functional), and JJYY (which stands for nothing..."you know, like Google" they told me).