My First Foreign Teacher, Ms. Nina McPherson
“In September of 1984, as a new student in Class 8403 in the English Department of Central China Normal Institute (now Central China Normal University) in Wuhan, Hubei, life was full of happy surprises and possibilities. We welcomed Ms. Nina McPherson as our first foreign teacher, who touched our lives, made huge influence on us during the two years she taught us English.
She was a new Yale University graduate and taught us Conversational English in the first school year and then English Composition in the second year. Even after more than 4 decades, I still remember how she came across as a foreign teacher, just a few years our senior, confident, energetic, versatile, enthusiastic, and passionate about her job.
In the two years, she brought numerous first experiences to us. She asked us to call her Nina, not the usual way we addressed our teachers from primary school to university. Surprise, happy surprise!
After two or three weeks, she helped us to find an English name for ourselves for the first time. She sat with each of us and learned how we pronounced our Chinese name and she wrote down a handful of English names that sounded like or close to our Chinese names and asked us to select one that we wanted to be our own names. It was surely a fun and warm assignment. We happily selected a name we liked, enjoyed a naming right that usually belongs to parents and stick to that name ever after.
Mid eighties was a time when China just opened its door to the outside world. She was our very first foreign teacher and brought native English to our classroom. Most of us did not hear native English speakers, let alone of having real contact with a foreigner. She filled our first imagination of the America, a far away country across the Pacific Ocean and its people with a positive note.
The English we learned from our textbooks was quite different from the real-world English spoken by native English speakers. For most of us, that was the first time we heard real-life English spoken by a native speaker. The American English that came out of her mouth so naturally and effortlessly was music to our ears.
Nina also brought color photos to our lives for the first time. The color group photographs she took for us brought back fond memories of those university years. It was rare for average Chinese to have cameras for color photos back then. It was extremely hard to find a shop that could develop color photography in the first year.
Nina had a passion towards her job and went extra miles to help us to learn and grow our English. She committed a ton of her spare time helping us to speak and write what we intended so we got our ideas out clearly and naturally. She authored some short funny English dramas from her own experience in learning and using Chinese language and directed her students to perform them, like the confusion of “me” and Chinese last name “Mi”, “who” and last name of “Hu” , which helped some of us found the acting talent that they did not know they had.
It is safe to say that she was the first person that introduced us to western paintings. We were shocked and excited when we opened those hard copy books of western paintings in the classroom. I believe she used her status as a foreign teacher and her wonderful persuasion skills to borrow those books from the university library for us. We were very shy to see those paintings of naked men and women, had no clue on how to appreciate those paintings. She asked us to tell what it was in the painting using our own words and what the artist wanted to convey. Bit by bit, we developed the sense and skill to appreciate Western paintings. Personally, I nurtured a love of impressionist paintings from those classes. The sweet memory of those classes came back each time when I stand in front of an impressionist painting in the museums and galleries I visited in many countries over the years. Each time I am grateful that I had the opportunity to see those great paintings in the classroom and had developed the skills to appreciate the beauty of Western painting.
During the second year when she taught us English composition, Nina taught us how to write an essay with an introduction, supporting paragraphs and a conclusion. She showed us with well-written essays how to construct a paragraph with a topic sentence with supporting details, make connection and transition from one paragraph to another and end the essay with a reinforcement statement. She scheduled time with each of us to go through our essay individually and went paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence on how to improve our writing. Each of us benefited enormously from those one-on-one conversations. These basic writing skills have proved practical and handy in our future life and career no matter what we do for a living.
Just as she put her whole heart into her teaching role, Nina strove to excel in everything she did. When she first went to China, she was armed with little English. While she stayed in China, she seized every opportunity to speak and improve her Chinese. By the end of her second year in China, she could speak very fluent Chinese you could hardly believe.
The way Nina committed to her teaching job and interacted with her students made her an unforgettable teacher for many of us and left a lasting mark on our lives in the years to come. I hope that young people from China and the US today can benefit from the open minds both countries demonstrated during that time and Yale-China could find people from both countries that are ready to open their minds and embrace a journey to understand people who speak different languages and learn from each other just like Ms. Nina McPherson.”