I'm still having real trouble teaching some of my classes. The levels are just so ridiculously mixed. My classes are what is labeled “senior two”, which means the kids are sixteen and seventeen. Each week I have dumbed the lessons down a bit more to try to find the level they can cope at. This week I have been teaching a lesson that was designed for, and successfully taught to, “junior 1” in other schools. That's eleven-year-olds. Some of them still can't do it. The only way for me to simplify it further is to teach primary school or kindergarten lessons.
In every class I have a few students who are pretty good, a few students who are OK and a lot of students who can't do their end of the conversation that goes
“Hello.”
“How are you?”
“I'm fine thanks, and you?”
“ I'm fine too.”
And that's the very first conversation every Chinese kid learns in kindergarten. Three-year-olds, come up on the street and initiate that one.