Xilin Community Center (2011-November)

Xilin Chinese Community Center is a place for retired Chinese members of the community to come and hang out with people who speak their language, understand their culture, and share in their retirement status. They offer various activities for the people who come, like Mahjong, ping pong, and English classes!

I have been helping the head English tutor with the class since February. Me and two other girls from my Chinese class would prepare English scripts to practice with the students. We help them with pronunciation and understanding, and have a little Chinese, English exchange in the process. It was a very rewarding experience, especially when the teacher presented me with a great opportunity. The volunteer organization she had gotten involved with the Community Center through is called Literacy Dupage. It is a non-profit organization of very dedicated people that helps ESL and English speakers reach higher with their grasp on the English language. She insisted I take the training, which was 18 spread-out hours of training, all were very fun, I met a lot of great people, and the instructor was very insightful and entertaining. Now that I have completed the training, I have taken over for the head instructor while she is on vacation.

The first class teaching them on my own was a disaster. I had thought they were prepared for much more than they actually were. Because the head instructor told me she wanted them to work on their understandings of instructional material, I decided to aim big. I printed out a recipe, an instructional sheet on how to assemble a chair, and a map. I thought they could separate into groups and read it together. Then, they would tell me: 1. Words they didn’t understand, 2. What they thought the instructional material was about (because I omitted the titles for each one) and 3. What the steps were. The one copy I had handed out to each group was apprehended and whisked off to have copies made of it by one of the students. This gave us nothing to work with, and awkward moments of looking around at each other in a chaotic mess of what-the-hell-is-going-on until this sweetheart, who only wanted to help me out and do well, came back with the copies. I decided to work on them one by one because the group thing was obviously not going to happen. The entire day went very awkwardly, we lost the chair assembly sheet, the map went well, but the recipe was an absolute disaster. The whole day was an absolute disaster. It was a true miracle that anybody showed up to the second day of me teaching!
I will talk more about that, though, once I make sure people come to this week’s class, because a lot of people were missing from the third class, so I fear that I may have chased them away with my second lesson. I’ll wait to get their feedback to tell all about that!