Everything Just Takes a Bit of Getting Used To...

I know…I don’t usually post boring day to day things on my blog.  I usually just write about life realizations or something equally tragic and dramatic every 4-5 months, but now that I’m in China and several people have asked for regular updates, I’m here to bore you :)

It might help a bit if I explained exactly what my job is here in China.  I am teaching in a pretty high-class middle school here in Hangzhou, and my students are seventh and eighth graders.  I am an oral English teacher.  The students have Chinese teachers who teach them English reading, writing, grammar, etc.  My job is simply to make them practice speaking English.  I teach 20 classes a week and each class is a different group of students, about 45 students in each class.  This means I have about 900 different students!  That’s a lot, and it really keeps me from doing things I like to do with my classes, like give gifts and remember names!  But at the same time, it creates less work for me as I only have to prepare one lesson per week…I just have to teach the same lesson 20 times which could potentially be unbelievably boring for me, but the students are all so different that they keep it interesting and dynamic. In most of my classes, the students’ Chinese English teacher comes along to act as an assistant to me, aiding in translating difficult concepts and that sort of thing.  Some of them are awesome and they undoubtedly make the class go over more smoothly.  Some of them are absolutely useless snobs who sit in the back of my class with their noses in the air refusing to help me; I could do without them, thank you very much. Those also happen to be my WORST classes; somehow the students are far more disruptive and defiant in the classes with those kinds of teaching ‘assistants.’  I am very tempted to tell the principle I don’t want them coming to my class, but I’m not really in a position to be making enemies.

Overall, each day last week got better and better with the students.  I quickly learned how to best engage them and every day felt easier than the last.  However, I have some really challenging groups of students on Mondays.  It is already becoming clear to me that Mondays will be a constant rollercoaster.  It is the day I have the most classes, 6, and they are each so different from one another.  Some of the classes are very active and complete their work and present and share so many ideas, while other classes literally make me want to scream. 

I’m also finally starting to make some friends at school.  The highlight of my week was probably when three of the teachers actually CHOSE to sit with me at lunch last Wednesday.  Honestly, it felt like one of the best moments…ever. They sat and talked with me, and the four of us have had every meal together since!  Two of them don’t speak English too well, but one of them, Elsie, is one of the English assistants who helps in two of my classes and she is my absolute favorite person here.  She tells me so many things about the school and the city that I would never know without her and she is so friendly and talkative.

I had a really great weekend as well. I just spent Friday night at home, doing nothing, but it was nice.  Saturday I decided I would venture out into a particular part of the city.  I was preparing myself for the inevitably of failed communication and confused taxi drivers and heading out the building door when I turned around, went up the stairs, walked up to my next door neighbor’s door and knocked.  Eric lives next door to me and he is one of the three teachers who eats with me at lunch/dinner.  Most of the students and teachers had gone home for the weekend, but Eric is from another province and stays for the weekends so I thought he might be lonely, and I wanted to invite him into the city with me.  He immediately and excitedly agreed, put his shoes on, and ran out the door to meet me.  We got a cab and headed for the shopping district.  Not that I had any desire whatsoever to shop (as if I even could in this country), but we walked around the area for about an hour or so.  We then decided to go to the natural history museum.  Not that there was ANYthing special about it; we didn’t even really look at anything.  We walked past every display with complete disinterest; we obviously cared far more about the air conditioning!  I’m pretty sure it’s the only real reason we went inside. Afterward we sat in a small café where Eric ordered a couple of sweets to offer me…he then made me eat it all by myself and he didn’t have anything.  That’s the way we do things in our country, he explained.  Great; Greece #2. Mercilessly stuff me up like a turkey at Thanksgiving.  We headed back toward the school, but got out at a part of our district that I had never been to before and walked to the school from there.  It was a really nice area and apparently has one of the top food streets in the city.  That night, I went to a bar called Coco Banana to meet my friend Jamie and his classmates.  I also met some more American teachers.  And I got to the bar all by myself with no troubles (after taking a picture of the address to show the taxi driver, of course).  On Sunday, Jamie and I went to West Lake.  It was awesome.  I really liked that area so much.  It was beautiful and felt peaceful and there were a lot of great shops, restaurants, etc around.  We decided to go into a shopping mall for a bit and ended up stumbling across the videotaping of auditions for China’s Got Talent.  Needless to say, we saw a couple of unbelievably funny auditions.  We went out to the lake as it got dark and watched a water fountain show they put on every night. It was really such a nice area and I can see myself going back there pretty frequently.

So, things are going well!  I’m settling in, getting to know a few people, and learning how to deal with my students. In the end, everything just takes a bit of getting used to.  

[Some of my students working on this week's presentation]