ETTP 2015 Luoding | marcocheng

ETTP 2015 @ Luoding, Guangdong

"Our trainers might only be here a part of our lives, but they have given us good memories that will last forever. Thank you, my dear trainers. May you be healthy and happy! I Look forward to meeting next time."

Pan Mulan, junior secondary school English trainee @ ETTP 2015 Luoding

Group photo (unofficial) - people in the front row are officials and trainers of ETTP 2015 Luoding.

Group A: Benedict Ng (team & group leader), Amy Zou, Jacque Lin

Group B: Dorothy Kehl (group leader), Dr Frank Kehl, Ivy Huang

Group C: Teresa Wong (group leader), Mary Anne Ho, Marco Cheng

Group D: Susanne Ng (group leader), Shirley Wong, Nicole Wong

Brief Introduction

Luoding (羅定) is the most western city of Guangdong Province and is few kilometres away from Guangxi Province. A very underrated area with no proper loos, Luoding has a population of 2 million people and standard of English is below par. However, Luoding has developed greatly in the past few years and is no longer considered a village, but a small city instead. You may browse through the photos in my album by clicking here.

MMLC	View of the school
Classroom

Day 1 - 18/7/2015

Arrival - We took a travel bus to Shenzhen Bay from Hong Kong, met up a few other trainers and set off for Luoding on a bus authorised by the Luoding Educational Bureau. It was a very long journey; it took us nearly 5 hours to get there from Shenzhen (apparently it's nearly 400km away, that's why). We arrived at around 6pm, just in time for dinner and meeting the officials and sponsors for this particular event. The hotel where we stayed in Luoding was, just okay. My room hadn't had air-conditioning and for the past week, I had to sleep while sweating at the same time (note that the outside temperatre of Luoding was reaching 36 degrees!)

Dinner with the trainers, officials and sponsors

Work on First Day
Afternoon Session
Night streets in Luoding

Day 2 - 19/7/2015

Opening Ceremony - Breakfast started at 7:10am in the hotel and trust me, waking up at such an early time was horrendous, although I managed to cope after a few days. We headed off to the school which was only a 3 minute ride from the hotel. Before the ceremony began, all of us had to take a group photo under the heat. Pretty unbearable weather, I must say, especially to the ones who cannot handle heat.

Grouping - An hour later, trainees are allocated into their own groups; each group should consist of approximately 25-30 trainees. All the trainees were junior secondary school teachers.

Morning Session - The usual introduction of course, and some icebreaking games + songs to liven up the atmosphere. We also tidied up the classroom and arranged the desks/chairs (too much work for me there). The morning session wasn't long; it only lasted for an hour and a half before we were ready to go back to the hotel for lunch.

Afternoon Session - We had a 2 hour break after lunch and got back to school at 2pm, just in time for some afternoon singing with the trainees. I sat at the back just to keep an eye on trainees who were falling asleep, even though I was about to as well after a huge meal. The day ended with a conversation session amongst the groups of trainees. What was next? Dinner of course.

PS: I can't actually remember what and where we had dinner during that week since we went out every single night, despite being tired of course!

Day 3 - 20/7/2015

Teaching Day - My day to shine! I was in charge of teaching three modules in the morning - Vowels and Consonants, Pronunciation and sentence reading, Introduction to Poems. 2 hours of non-stop teaching and interaction with the trainees was tiring; well at least my voice was still okay, thanks to the Strepsils I've brought with me. The trainees seemed to understand every single bit on what I said, which is great news. My teaching materials weren't that overly complicated I think!

Afternoon Session - There wasn't much going on in the afternoon apart from watching a film called 'Front of the Class'. As usual, I sat at the back and so did some of the trainers. During the post-movie discussion, a trainee told me that she nearly shed a tear at the finale, when the protagonist was awarded 'best teacher in Virginia' even with his Tourette's. "That's nice to hear," I thought to myself. But one of the trainees confessed to me and said 'she couldn't understand a single word', despite the fact that the English subtitles were up on the screen. Good heavens.

Dinner - The officials drove us to the villages of Luoding and we had some authentic Guangdong cuisine. Everything was made fresh; the vegetables were particularly fresh though since it was organic, not GM. In fact I was in love with eating vegetables when I was in Luoding. Full you say? Well, definitely.

Post-dinner - I had to prepare my afternoon plenary session for the next day, and I was literally shitting my pants when I saw two huge weird-looking cockroaches on the table next to my bed. Eventually I had to unleash my 'cruelty' and exterminated the cockroaches with a single slipper. Ruthless, eh?

Trainees working hard on their pronunciation in English.

1/7

Day 4 - 21/7/2015

Role-play and Reading Comprehension

General - Trainees were taught how to do skim-reading and create questions while doing reading comprehension. They were also given another task: to finish off an exercise as homework. Were they willing to do it at all? Well, it seems so. We also did some script writing and role play related to the film we watched on Day 3, which went smoothly in my opinion. Some of the trainees had to act as the protagonist of the film; Brad Cohen, a person with Tourette's syndrome. Pretending to have Tourette's syndrome is hard - but the trainees did pay a lot of effort, even though it sounded like they had hiccups. Oh well, what can you expect anyway!?

Afternoon - Probably one of the most stressful days since I was in charge of the afternoon's plenary session - a lecture on Problems with Chinglish to 120 trainees in total. Somehow, my laptop was being an arse rght at that time, and I had to transfer my powerpoint to the computer in the MMLC. Well it worked, but the words were very tiny it was actually hard to read from the back of the room. I had to suck it up and continue anyway, but things eventually worked out in the end. What about the trainees? Some of them were active, only a few started to fall asleep and I couldn't care much. When I announced that I will be giving away books written by me to those who answered my questions correctly, the trainees who were asleep woke up instantly.. From this plenary session, I have learnt that in order to gain someone's attention, you need prizes. Wonder what would happen if I don't have them...

Day 5 - 22/7/2015

More teaching - We started the morning with Readers' Theatre. Readers' Theatre is basically play reading from a script - so there's nothing fancy about it really. It was pretty straight-forward, apart from hearing quite a few errors in the pronunciation.

Lesson plan - Probably the most challenging topic amongst trainees, especially when they at first refused to write in English. They claimed that it was hard to think in English, since they normally use Mandarin to teach English instead. So did it work out in the end? It did actually, when I told them to 'think in Chinese, but write in English'. They actually managed to write something down; all they needed to do was to brainstorm their ideas. Not hard, is it?

Afternoon - Movie time once again, this time watching 'Mr Holland's Opus' which lasted for a whopping 2 hours and 20 minutes. This was a good time for me to correct the homework from the trainees - all 120 of them. 2 hours wasn't enough actually, I only managed to correct 40 of them as most of their answers were incorrect and I had to write down the correct ones. If that wasn't bad enough, some of the answers were completely identical (that is, the trainees were copying from one another) yet wrong. Absolutely low-class.

Post-dinner - There were 80 more sheets of paper yet to be corrected, and when correcting 40 of them took me 2 hours to complete, surely double the amount of papers would take me double the time to finish. Yes that was true. My right hand was sore after correcting all those papers (in one go whilst watching TV).

Some edible longans near the school.

"Correcting assignment takes bloody ages."

Presenting teaching plans to other trainees and trainers.

Day 6 - 23/7/2015

Presentation Day - Big day for the trainees as each representative(s) from every team was/were required to present their teaching plans for at least 15 minutes. At first we thought the trainees might simply just give up, or do a very short presentation and call it a day, but to our surprise we were more than wrong. Every team actually did very well and all of them manage to present more than the given time! They prepared a lot of teaching materials for themselves, and were clear on their objectives (i.e. what they were going to teach and what would they achieve from the lesson). Perhaps one should never judge a book by its cover, no?

Afternoon Mock Wedding - This was my first time being a bridegroom (a fake one obviously), and apparently ETTP has been doing this activity since 2010. The marriage was held in the school, not a church, and there wasn't a proper altar anyway, so we had to use the stage instead. I myself didn't know that there was going to be a mock wedding and of course, I was not well-dressed. Despite having a tie, a plain white shirt with cufflinks and black sturdy shoes, I don't have proper trousers. In the end, I had to wear my own black jeans - well at least they were black!

PS: My 'bride' was wearing an actual wedding gown with a veil. Weather-wise, it was reaching 35 degrees during the day with no air-conditioning. Imagine dressing into a whole new outfit with sweat all over your body and forehead...muy fantastico!

Day 7 - 24/7/2015

We didn't teach much on this day because we focused more on recapping what the trainees have learnt from the past week.

Prizes and group photo - Since it was the final day of teaching, I brought with me 25 books written by me in the past and distributed them amongst the trainees. Was I happy? Of course, mainly because the trainees were delighted and my suitcase was way lighter (thanks to those bloody books). I signed my name and wrote a few encouraging words so that they could keep it as a gift (I hope they didn't sell or throw it away!)

Competition rehearsals - I thought it might be a good idea for the trainees to do a bit of rehearsal before the competition, since there wasn't much to teach anyway, apart from advising them on how to teach and learn English effectively.

Post lessons - Some of the trainees invited us out for dinner and a tour around Luoding at around 7:30pm, despite the fact that the officials wanted to meet the trainers for dinner on the same night. Well Teresa, Mary Anne (my colleagues) and I didn't care much about the feast with the officials, so we promised the trainees that we would go out for the night. They picked us up at the hotel and we visited the parks, played a game of table tennis, had street food and even danced in the park for the heck of it.. Apparently the trainees told us that 'this is the normal life of a local in Luoding', which was opposite from the people in HK. We also had toad congee and snails (yes, I mean it, we actually ate toads), they actually taste lush in my opinion. It's basically like eating frog, but it would put people off when they know they're eating toads rather than frogs. We got back to the hotel at around 11pm, heckie tired but was a wonderful night for all three of us and the trainees,

The trainees of Group C and trainers: Mary Anne, Teresa and Marco

Beef offal and tofu

Day 8 - 25/7/2015

Singing/Verse Speaking Competition - It wasn't as as active as expected, unfortunately. If I remember correctly there were only 5 teams who joined the verse speaking competition, and 4 for singing; perhaps the trainees were a tad bit shy? Who knows!

Closing Ceremony - Eight days of training finally came to an end as some of the trainees said their vote of thanks. We sang 'Auld Lang Syne' for the very last time before bidding farewell to the trainees. It was a very touching moment as trainees came and hug us, one after the other. They gave us a lot of presents: at least 10 kilograms of longans and homegrown peanuts, some fermented beans, a framed photo and a card. To be honest, I wasn't expecting any presents, but there were so many I couldn't even fit it in my own suitcase!

Post-lessons - Some of the trainees (Mulan, Jamie, Mavis, Sudysai, Pauline and Emma) invited us once again for afternoon tea at a famous wonton noodle store in Luoding. It was delicious yet cheap, as long as you pay 5 RMB you get a huge bowl of wonton noodles - absolute bargain! Afterwards, Sudysai drove us to her school in the village where she lives. It was a 30 minute journey from the city; we were amazed by how huge the school is, even though some parts of it were a bit worn out. They treated us for dinner afterwards at a restaurant (which had no customers), had a lot of food as usual, drove us back to the hotel and said our goodbyes before heading back to Shenzhen (I continued on to Guizhou to teach). Packing up at 10pm was the worst bit, when you had to figure how to pack up the presents in order.

PS: In the end, I had to give away most of my longans and peanuts to the receptionists in the hotel, because my suitcase was full of clothes and presents.