Teaching a One Health Lesson… In Mandarin!
February 2021
This February we asked Doris Ma, Lesson Leader with the One Health Institute and BASIS Volunteer to share her unique experience of teaching an entire BASIS lesson for in a dual language class.Since I was born and raised in Hong Kong, my mother tongue is Cantonese. However, as my schooling was an international school, in which the primary language of instruction was English and Mandarin, I am technically trilingual. While I spoke Cantonese regularly with my family and English with my peers, I always deemed Mandarin to be my “weakest language” simply because I didn’t have many people to speak it to.
Doris teaching a BASIS lesson to a group of students
So when I heard about teaching a lesson in Mandarin, to be honest, I wasn’t all that thrilled. In fact, for the first time, instead of the usual feeling of excitement, I was actually petrified. Teaching… In Mandarin??? Initially, I thought, No way. Yes, I have a *slight* advantage because I've been teaching about One Health since March of 2019, but out of the 600+ students that I’ve taught, not a single lesson had been conducted in a language other than English. So what came to be my first ever Mandarin lesson would definitely be nothing less than a challenge.
I taught the lesson with Founder and President of One Health Lessons (OHL), Dr. Deborah Thomson, Bay Area Scientists Inspiring Schools (BASIS)’s Senior Manager of Outreach and Education, Tyler Chuck, and fellow OHL intern, Yifan Shen. The class consisted of 60 students which was then divided up into two English and two Mandarin lessons.
After Deb and Tyler’s introductions, it was my turn to introduce myself. I decided to do it in Mandarin for the sake of the students who are expecting a Mandarin lesson. So after introducing myself, I confidently gave the floor to my fellow intern, Yifan. In Mandarin, a slight deviation in tone changes the entire meaning of a word, so when Yifan went on to introduce himself and emphasized the pronunciation of “Fan”, I realized I’d totally bombed his name. To be fair, I had never heard him say his name in Chinese, nor did I know what the actual characters of his name were, so I guess I had an excuse…
Before I go into the details of the next portion of the lesson, allow me to give you a mini lesson on the Chinese language in case you weren’t already familiar. First off, there are 50,000 characters in the Chinese language. Don’t let that number scare you, because an educated person in the Chinese language would only know about 8,000 of those. And even better, you only really need to know 2,000-3,000 to be able to read a newspaper. As for me, even though I am "educated," the fact that I was not part of the local school system greatly reduced the number of characters I needed to know, just as far as I could read and write proficiently to complete my final exam papers. So I would probably place myself in between the newspaper and ‘really educated' level.
To make things even more complicated, there are two "versions" of the Chinese written language: Chinese Traditional and Chinese Simplified. Think of them as two sets of the same 50,000 characters mentioned before, but some of them are in a simpler form. Now given these two versions of Chinese characters, you can choose to read it aloud in Mandarin or another dialect of Chinese such as Cantonese and they will sound the same in either format. So basically, written and spoken Chinese are distinct and the version of written Chinese that you use depends on the region that you live in. For instance, Chinese Simplified is found in most of Mainland China, while Chinese Traditional is most often used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Anyway, I bring this up because growing up in Hong Kong exposed me to the Chinese Traditional version of Chinese. And so… you guessed it. The day of the lesson, I found out that the students use Chinese Simplified. So I have to speak in a language that I was already unconfident about teaching in, PLUS I need to do it in a version of Chinese that I can’t read fluently?!?!
The day before the lesson, I set it up so that the Chinese Simplified version for the students was shared on my computer screen, while I read off of the Chinese Traditional version on my iPad screen. Surprisingly, it wasn’t too difficult and I was able to pick it up given my practice with my parents the day before.
So when I heard about teaching a lesson in Mandarin, to be honest, I wasn’t all that thrilled. In fact, for the first time, instead of the usual feeling of excitement, I was actually petrified.Teaching… In Mandarin??? Initially, I thought,No way. Yes, I have a *slight* advantage because I've been teaching about One Health since March of 2019, but out of the 600+ students that I’ve taught, not a single lesson had been conducted in a language other than English. So what came to be my first ever Mandarin lesson would definitely be nothing less than a challenge.
Slide from an introductory lesson of One Health
In the blink of an eye, we were moved to our breakout rooms. The second graders’ faces popped up on my screen one by one as I put the biggest smile on my face. After talk of species, mutations, and zoonotic diseases, the students were most aggressive to participate in the sentence mutation activity where they filled in the blanks of a sentence with their own words to model a genetic mutation. Not only did it practice their Chinese reading skills, it also made the fact that “mutation is change" an easier concept to understand.
There were a couple times where I could sense that some students were not as confident in Chinese as others, so they would ask questions in English and I would try my best to respond in only Chinese in order to encourage them to speak it as well in the supposedly Chinese class. I knew that if I let them know I was fluent in English as well, they’d all jump on me with English questions. And I am speaking from experience since I had a bilingual Mandarin teacher when I was a kid who I’d constantly speak to in my more confident language: English. Throughout the lesson, I may or may not have stumbled through my basic range of Chinese vocabulary and used many hand gestures and check-ins for understanding, but overall, I’d call it a great success. The students were eager to learn, engaged, and spoke mostly in Chinese. As the lesson ended, we were brought back to the main session with all 60+ kids. It was there that we received a heartwarming, all-at-once but out-of-sync “thank you” from all the students. Yes, heartstrings were pulled.
In closing, this is one of the most meaningful lessons I’ve taught in my entire 1.5 years of volunteering with BASIS! To teach in Mandarin was something I was always shy of doing due to many fears and doubts about my own language abilities, but this was the perfect opportunity to step out of my comfort zone. The eventual gain of knowledge and gratefulness of the students who learned something that day is what draws me back to teaching, over and over again.