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Classes at Guozhuang have actually finished now and I’m now back in the safe confines of Guan Ai School in Shanxi. I do miss the students at Guozhuang though, as they really were a great bunch.

Throughout the course and, I dare say, wherever and whenever I teach I try to teach students how to make use of the new skills they’re learning to more effectively do things in their daily lives. As the vast majority of the students in Guozhuang were involved in the machine tool repair-and-resell business, it seemed evident to me that what would be useful to them would be tools to better market their businesses.

I started out by asking them to create business cards using Word, and whilst the results were crude, it was a good learning exercise. A few days later I decided to try to teach them how to create a website, which was quite a bit more challenging.I used Google Sites because a) they already had Google accounts and b) because it’s easy to use, with a nice WYSIWYG editor. The great programming principle of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) applies just as well to teaching and learning as it does to writing code. Arguably a wiki would have afforded more flexibility, but the crazy wiki pseudo-code syntax would have been completely alien to them.

Even given this simplification it wasn’t easy for them to create a decent site. In terms of technical ability, there was no problem – the WYSIWYG editor made it as easy to write a page as editing a Word document. However the problem lay in the fact that to that point in time they simply hadn’t seen many websites. They didn’t know what one should contain. It didn’t occur to them that a business should have an About Us page, contact details, photos and descriptions of their products. As a result students tended to create overly simplistic pages that didn’t really address their audience.

I’ll hold my hand up and say that I was caught off-guard by this. This need for explanation of what a website is, what purposes different ones serve and how they’re typically structured didn’t cross my mind before the class. It was complacency, probably borne of my prior experience teaching computing and the previous days’ successes.

Wise old birds will always advise you to be prepared, no matter what you’re going to do. Whilst I mostly agreed with that, I generally took a more skewed view, something akin to “Try to be prepared, but if you can’t be bothered, then at least be really knowledgeable!” If you’re the latter then you’ll always have some tool to pull out of the box to get you out of a bind, right?

Well it turns out those wise old birds were right. The fact is that no matter how much knowledge and experience you’ve gained, you’ll always be stepping into an at least slightly different situation every time you teach – no two classes will ever be the same. If you hate to fail; hate having that awful feeling when you’re in front of a class of expectant students and not having a plan B after your inadequate plan A didn’t get through to them, and literally being able to see the respect they had for you drain from their eyes as you flounder, then prepare. There’s no short cut around it.

So that lesson kind of sucked. It may be too late now, but I’d still like to formulate a plan B, for the next time I teach this class. What would I do better this time?

1. Well first of all I’d still tell them that we’re going to build websites for our small enterprises. But rather than go right in to the technical know-how of how to do that, I’d split them into groups and have them conduct a fact finding mission, surfing around sites on the net. Lots and lots of sites. All sorts of sites. News sites, sports sites, retail sites, movie sites, music sites, big sites, small sites.
2. At the same time I’d ask them to make notes, answering a few key questions:
   • What type of person would go on this site?
   • What do you think they would be looking for?
   • How do the sites organise their information?
3. I’d then gather everyone to summarise their findings and see if we could get some agreement amongst the group. Through this we could create a map laying out what webpages need to be created for their sites and how they would be categorised (Main categories? Lathe, planer, etc. Subcategories? Bench lathe, turret lathe, CNC lathes, etc.). Through this map, which is actually a site map (a new concept!), I’d be able to teach them about navigation menus and how to structure them.
   

   One used bench lathe, only 3000RMB!

4. Only after this would I go on to teach the nitty-gritty of how to use Google Sites to build the site.

I’m fairly confident this would work quite well. At the very least it would work better to what I actually did this time around. If anyone has any suggestions about how this plan could be improved then leave your suggestions in the comments below.

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