Teach English in Qingtaiping Zhen - Enshi Tujiazu Miaozu Zizhizhou

I would like to address a few educational issues I witnessed in the schools I work with. In these countries, a large percentage of people share the great difficulty of barely surviving and possessing little or no education. Many cannot read or write well, even if they have attended secondary school. According to the official education system, from year 5 students have to be taught a foreign language, in general, English. However, in the classroom, I can observe that most students find themselves unable to understand the native language, so I ask myself how can they be able to learn another language? By conversing with other teachers, I see they are unanimous in saying that the social environment immersed in poverty needs to be considered when planning and applying teaching and learning approaches. Mainly for public schools, the syllabus to teach English needs to be designed for people from vulnerable, social circumstances. But how to teach with poverty in mind? The question arises of whether these poor people have the same inclination to pursue knowledge as those from more “privileged” backgrounds. Another problem I observed when teaching in the field is spawned by the governmental guidelines for educational methodology called ‘Continued Progression’. Continued Progression is a procedure in schools by which students are permitted to progress through the phases of a course, regardless of their success in the preceding phase of the course. It was considered an advanced pedagogical methodology by Paulo Freire (1970) because it proposes constant, cumulative evaluation. The problem is that, when applied inefficiently, this methodology produces students who are unable to read and write by the end of primary education and they graduate from high school as functional illiterates, unable to interpret a simple text. In my view, continued progression has created problems for English training as many students cannot learn a new language because of existing learning deficits from their previous education. Students find it difficult to develop new mental schema to internalize the knowledge which is essential for learning a new language. For this reason, they cannot assimilate the content and skills needed to move on. In addition, the Latin American governments tend to blame teachers for the quality of education delivered at the schools and fails to see the impact of politics on education initiatives. This impact is reflected in the poor physical infrastructure and problematic teaching methods at training. It seems to me that the governments try to solve these problems by implementing quick remedies in the form of inefficient policies with little to no effect. Thus, politicians exempt themselves of any blame and place the blame on teachers instead. Of the government’s remedies, I can see that in the last ten years, the Brazilian Government has gone to great lengths to provide teachers with better training through reflective training courses. This myopic approach reduces educational problems to the individual abilities of each teacher and neglects the bigger problem of the effect of ineffective policy-making on teaching and learning. The governments’ efforts give me the impression that teachers were regarded by the governments as Messiah-like beings of endless strength and stamina, expected to be always accessible to students in their educational quest. However, it is imperative that everyone does their part to improve the quality of education. Educational issues cannot be solved by the sole effort of individual teachers and local communities. While the mentioned social and educational problems are challenges to be solved by governments, I believe there is an important role to be played by the parents in education. By reflecting on the involvement of the family in children’s schooling, I observed that many parents expressed the desire to have better teachers and fewer students per classroom. However, they were not willing to take ownership or responsibility for their children’s educational activities themselves; nor were they willing to allow an increase in school fees. If parents are unable to recognize the unreasonableness of demanding a service which essentially replaces them as the primary educators of their children while requiring teachers to provide higher quality education without parental involvement, how can they expect their children to understand the importance of learning? I observed that many parents do not believe their children’s education is affected by the examples set by them as role models. Rather, they place the onus of their children’s education entirely on the education system and do not see the importance of the role parents play in enacting social change. Regard students' motivation to learn English, some teachers with whom I shared my concern recognized that the students who see English as a skill for a better career opportunity are the ones with the highest chance of success after training. It seems that the success of the English training is not based solely on the workload, or the methodological structure of the program, rather, success depends on the level of interest the learners have in using their language ability to work. Conversely, students who received a greater amount of information or better quality education did not necessarily end up more successful in the market. To succeed, students have to see English not just as a qualification, but as a useful capability to be used in the future. Finally, I am constantly concerned about the behavior of socially vulnerable students in the classroom. They demonstrate a severe lack of social skills when interacting with each other. They are aggressive with colleagues and disrespectful to teachers. They bring into the classroom the violent attitudes and behaviors they learned at home. The problem is: when in the classroom, students tend to interact and solve conflicts in the same way they do in their home environment, presenting a lack of manners and aggressive behavior. To address anti-social behavior, I believe that teachers need more time dedicated to working on students’ social skills. It is necessary to include activities to improve students’ social skills and interaction and cultivate more group cohesiveness.