Guest-Teaching Chinese, and Learning America

 Matt Nager for The New York Times

Zheng Yue,a young woman from China who is teaching her native language to students in this town on the Oklahoma grasslands, was explaining a vocabulary quiz on a recent morning. Then a student interrupted.

“Sorry, I was zoning out,” said the girl, a junior wearing black eye makeup. “What are we supposed to be doing?”

Ms. Zheng seemed taken aback but patiently repeated the instructions.

“In China,” she said after class, “if you teach the students and they don’t get it, that’s their problem. Here if they don’t get it, you teach it again.”

Ms. Zheng, 27, is teaching Chinese in Lawton — and learning a few things herself about American culture — because of a partnership between an agency of China’s Education Ministry and the College Board.

China wants to teach the world its language and culture, and Ms. Zheng is one of about 325 guest teachers who have volunteered to work for up to three years in American schools, with their salaries subsidized by the Chinese government. A parallel effort has sent about 2,000 American school administrators to visit China at Beijing’s expense.

Ms. Zheng left her teaching post at a provincial university south of Beijing two years ago to come to Lawton. She is out of her usual element in this city of strip malls and car dealerships surrounded by cattle ranches and an Army base. The culture of American schools is also different.

“My life in high school was torture, just studying, nothing else,” said Ms. Zheng (pronounced djung). “Here students lead more interesting lives,” partly because they are more involved in athletics, choir and other activities.

“They party, they drink, they date,” she added. “In China, we study and study and study.”
In interviews, several other Chinese teachers said they had some difficulties adjusting to the informality of American schools after working in a country where students leap to attention when a teacher enters the room.

One Chinese teacher who has built a successful language program in Wisconsin, Hongmei Zhao, said a few students sometimes disrupted classes by speaking English so rapidly that she cannot understand them.
“Then the whole class laughs, maybe because of my accent,” Ms. Zhao said.

Ms. Zheng said none of her students had been disagreeable, and Samantha Weidenmaier, an assistant principal at the school, MacArthur High, said that in Ms. Zheng’s classes “the respect levels are kicked up a notch.”

Still, Ms. Zheng said she believed that teachers got little respect in America.
“This country doesn’t value teachers, and that upsets me,” she said. “Teachers don’t earn much, and this country worships making money. In China, teachers don’t earn a lot either, but it’s a very honorable career.”

If you are interested the story, please go to The New York Times for detail.