Tuesday is pretty much a day in the life of a teacher for
me. I have class all day from 8 – 5.
I had pattern cutting up till lunch and I’m not going to lie this is
possibly the worst part of my day. It is interesting to see the students work
but everyone is so shy including the tutors, no one wants to speak to me. The
lesson is for 3 and a half hours and this drags. As many of the students are so
busy they don’t want my help and don’t even want to try and learn English
whilst working. I’d say about a quarter of the students like talking to me and
I have been able to help them with their patterns, as I now have the same
pattern book in English so I can understand what they show me. I have also been
teaching these students the names of the equipment in English.
Angela my little friend in the class told me that today the
tutors would be checking their work. This was very similar to our group crits
in England so it was understandable to many students were too busy to chat, so
I’m hoping in the next lesson I will be able to help and speak to more of the
students. Their work seemed very dated and commercial and pretty much copied an
image they had liked. It appeared that the class had been split into sections
for example 1 set worked with chiffon and created floaty dresses and another
worked with cotton and created cute day dresses. I also noticed that many of
the outfits had been made in some crazy sizes. A pair of shorts literally
dropped to the floor on one girl, unlike England where we work to an industry
size 12. Another thing I noticed was that none of the garments had the correct
fastenings for example there was no zips on trousers and no plackets, or
buttons on shirts, I asked the students why and they said the tutor has said
they don’t need to include them. I find this very strange, as I don’t
understand how the tutor can mark the work unfinished without seeing if it fits
properly or not. 11.30am the bell rang…finally lunch time.
After lunch I had a class on Luxury Brands, this week my
tutor asked if I could go early as this week the students were photographing a
model, which they had styled to look like a certain brand. The only brands that
seem to have been chosen were Chanel, Vivienne Westwood, Versace, Burberry and
Givenchy. This class seemed similar to our styling class from the first year,
however their approach and their final outcome are incomparable to our class at
Uni. Their awareness of the fashion industry and designers is very limited and
for me this is quite shocking. Their work literally revolves around the above
designers and they don’t seem keen to explore and further their own research on
the Internet. It seems if their teacher doesn’t tell them about certain
designers they will never know about them.
The students that had chosen to style a model in the style
of Givenchy had chosen Audrey Hepburn for their inspiration forgetting what the
actual current collections maybe. Lots of Tiara’s were involved to say the
least. Becca and I teach the same class but to different students, today we worked
together to try and help the students with poses and makeup. They all seemed
very unprepared and had no idea of how their poses for their brand should be,
for example Vivienne Westwood was trying to do pretty girly poses, and the
students were directing this, Becca and I had to try and improvise and show
them this was wrong, and used some magazines to help illustrate what we
meant. Some of the students were
quite good and I was quite impressed with their androgynous take on Burberry.
Tuesday night was pizza hut night, in preparation for a grim
few days of food in Hangzhou…
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