I am now a lecturer!(parttime)

My first class of Introduction to Art History consisted of forty five Chinese students who had just finished secondary school levels of education. Most have a tough time understanding what i was talking about I realized after digging deeper into their bored minds. So I had to switch to a lower gear and slowed down until I was teaching English as well as Art History. It was not easy to gain their complete attention as most had their headphones glued to their ears half the time and most sat chatting away among themselves whenever I read from my notes and they find it difficult to follow.

I told them of my having lived abroad and some of the things that I did in school and this seemed to grab their attention for awhile it even earned a little better respect from one or two hardcore bored ones. I also found out how weak their English was by making them each stand up and read to the class a paragraph from the handouts and this too seem to work as most listened more closely to what was being read by their fellow student. It also gave me a chance to correct their pronunciation.

In this beginning class i introduced to them common artistic terminologies like what is aesthetics, beauty, style etc. to which hardly anyone dared to venture and answer or tried to until very much coaxing. So i set them an assignment of answering these questions to be handed in next class.
" Creation is never in the hands of the individual. It ceases entirely when individuality, with its capacities, gifts, techniques and so on, becomes dominant. Creation is the movement of the unknowable essence of the whole; it is never the expression of the part."

I started the Art history lesson by introducing them to The Art of Prehistoric Man and showed them slides of various historical objects and explained to the best of my ability the significance of the art pieces which included, The cave paintings, Venus of Willendorf, the Plaster heads of Jericho , the Stonehenge etc. I had to do allot more tutorial on the subject matter than I thought as I could tell that most of the students were lost. I insisted on the students to stay focus on the class by telling them of the significance of the Fertility or child bearing significance of the Willendorf figurine and an how compared to present day child bearing has become so decadent that we find foetuses being discarded in toilet bowls and garbage dump or babies being harvest and sold by syndicates like cattle. This sort of woke them up to a little bit of reality.

Overall I find their lack of ability to grasp the language as a major handicap and to pursue the course as according that which is being set by the school would be unproductive and would do them a disservice. The students will have to be taught at a slower pace and with greater focus being shed upon their grasping the basics as a foundation towards their understanding and mastering the subject matter.
Personally I enjoyed the class as i too am in the process of learning and i even told the students that they were my teacher and that together we were going to dive into the prehistoric waters of art and in the process become better acquainted with the contemporary art works.