Teaching children in Hong Kong

If I will have choices, I do not want to be a teacher as my career in the future. However, I really love to talk with kids so I often look for some voluntary job of teaching. I already have quite a lot of experience working with children.

This summer, I had an opportunity to be in charge of three summer classes in Hong Kong. My duty is to teach children how to draw and paint. The summer classes were held by The Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions which is one of the political parties in Hong Kong. Last year, I helped them as a volunteer to teach children drawing at one of their office, so they gave me the offer of managing those summer classes this year.

I had more pressure to manage the summer classes than the last year because I had to take the responsibility for those parents who paid for their children to join the summer classes. Not just the health and safety but also what the children have learnt from my lessons, the parents in Hong Kong are very care about this. They expect their children can draw something understandable rather than something abstractive. That means the teacher draw something out on the board and let the children copy it that is the best and easiest way to show their parent what they learn. So many parents are happy with their children can draw a nice dog or a nice cat. I would say there are so many people without any sense of arts in Hong Kong. I did not want to teach drawing and painting with the way just copying. So I would like to do something different, that the children can learn the real skills. Eventually, I planned to teach them how to sketch and how to use watercolours.

I taught children how to draw a cartoon lion and tiger in 2009.

Last year, I used the way ‘draw and copy’ to teach the children drawing. They were very happy with it but I knew they almost learnt nothing from me. This year, I hoped the children could learn the real skills of sketching. I planned to do some life drawing for the first four lessons. Because of last year’s experience, the children about 4 years old could not really control their hand to draw and after on, I realised that sketching is not suitable for too small children. Therefore, I requested children who wanted to join my classes must be older than eight years old. Unfortunately, there were still two 6 years kids joined.

During the sketching lessons, I taught them how to draw objects with contrast. I used my lamp to shine on the object that I wanted them to draw. Those objects had very simple form such as eggs, apples, melons, boxes, etc. So the difference between the bright areas and the dark areas are obvious. When they were trying to draw those objects, I walked around and told them what they should do.

I used the similar way to teach in the watercolour lessons. A little bit difference was I needed to explain how to use watercolours and watercolours before we started because most Hong Kong people think any pigments which can be diluted by water are watercolours. I chose to teach watercolours because there are easy to be washed. In addition, the children would get excited to paint on a wet watercolour paper that they never tried before.

All in all, this was a good experience and I was quite enjoying teaching those children. There were 6 children each lesson so it was not difficult to handle. However, I think there was still something not good. The time was too short. It was only one hour per week. They would forget what they learnt until next week so it would be better if I could have two lessons per week. Moreover, some children did not want to join the classes actually. They were sent to my classes by their parents and they were absolutely not interested in drawing or painting. I had tried to get their concentration but it was too difficult.

Finally, I do not think the way I used is good to teach children drawing or painting. I used this way was because I learnt to draw and paint from this way and I thought it should work on children. Nevertheless, I forgot I was already a teenager when I started to learn art. Therefore, I prefer children just draw or paint anything they imagine. All right, what is the point to send them to those draw classes and painting classes then? Those classes are so popular in Hong Kong.