Well, I have officially begun my new life in Hangzhou, China! I arrived Thursday evening in Beijing where the company who hired me is located. I spent one night and day there doing logistics like learning how best to teach Chinese students and opening up a Chinese bank account. Friday night I boarded an overnight train and arrived the following morning in my new home city of Hangzhou.
I have free accommodation and meals on the school grounds. There are few teachers who speak English, and I am the only Western teacher at the school. My first lunch in the canteen was awkward to say the least. The food was amazing, but no one could speak to me. The teachers talked about me amongst themselves, laughing and showing sheer awe at the fact that I know how to eat with chopsticks. I felt like quite the display! Since then, I feel like people avoid sitting with me! I think they are afraid that they will have to try and speak English with me, so they avoid that possibility.
A part of me is quite uneasy about the fact that I won’t really have anyone to speak to here, until I meet some people (hopefully!) outside of the school. I am very fortunate, however, to know someone else living in this city for the year, someone I met while traveling in Cambodia just over a month ago. Saturday he came to the school to visit me and we went out that night to a bar downtown where I also met a few of his classmates from England. The only problem is that this city is MASSIVE…8 million people. It took Jamie about an hour and a half to get to my school, so I’m not exactly close to them. We also met some other people out on Saturday who told me that they have many Western teachers in the schools were they work; it kind of seems like I’m the only one around here going solo on this one.
I do feel a bit imprisoned here, however. There is tight security on the school grounds, with massive walls and gates all around campus. All the other teachers, as well as the students, live here. I have a 10 pm curfew and must be back on school grounds by then. I asked if I could come back later on the weekends so that I could go out, and they said I could come back ‘a little bit later.’ I sure hope that by that they mean 2 or 3 a.m. is ok! Haha. I did come back at 3 a.m. Saturday night before I knew about my curfew and had no problem being let into the gate, so hopefully it will be ok. Apparently the English teacher before me went out to a bar for a World Cup game and ended up drunk and passed out in front of the school yard, so they have concerns, but I think you all know I’m not likely to follow in his footsteps!
My schedule is pretty scattered throughout the week, with the busiest day being Monday, but I only teach 20 hours a week, so I foresee a lot of boredom in my future. Not quite sure how to fill all this time. It would be really great if I could somehow find another small job to do on the side, but I think the inconsistency in my schedule might make this pretty difficult. Coming out of an insanely intense anthropology Master’s program makes three hours of work seem like absolutely nothing, so I can imagine myself going a bit stir-crazy if I don’t find something else to fill up a bit of my time. I would love to take a Chinese class, or try to teach myself some Chinese. I also really wish I had a lot of books here and more DVDs/TV show seasons. I’ve seen everything I own soo many times! I’m going to try to find a bookstore with English books somewhere in the city.
I taught my first classes today. Six classes, all the same lesson. In fact, my other 14 classes this week will also be the same lesson as I have 20 different groups of students. Needless to say, the material is going to be ridiculously repetitive and boring for me, but the good thing is that I only have to prepare one lesson per week. The students are unbelievably shy. It is so difficult to engage them and get them to speak. This class is meant to be oral English only; no grammar, spelling, writing, reading, etc. But it’s very hard to conduct class when you have 50 little pairs of eyes staring at you without speaking. Class dynamics make some groups of students more fun than others, as is usual when teaching. I have a couple of classes that are a lot of fun, and some where no one wants to speak at all. Honestly, I’ve finished my first day of teaching feeling overwhelmingly frustrated. I was close to bursting into tears by the end of my sixth lesson. This experience is making me very nostalgic for Tanzania and my students there. I think it may be too early to really know how I will like this experience, but I do know that if I could actually make money teaching in Tanzania, I would have gone back. I am doing my best not to psych myself out, though, and not to dwell too much on thoughts of loneliness and language barriers. This is something to be expected when moving to a country where you can’t speak the language and very few people can speak your own. I am sure that in time I will make some friends and I will travel, and in the end it will be something very good for me. One student who spoke well and offered a lot of information, and who just started at this school, said something that resonated with me so much, and something I probably needed to hear at that moment. She said, “This is a very new experience for me. And I am missing my friends a lot. But even though it is hard, I know that this will open my eyes and it will teach me a lot about myself.” She is so very right.
[Below are images of my room and the school's campus]
I have free accommodation and meals on the school grounds. There are few teachers who speak English, and I am the only Western teacher at the school. My first lunch in the canteen was awkward to say the least. The food was amazing, but no one could speak to me. The teachers talked about me amongst themselves, laughing and showing sheer awe at the fact that I know how to eat with chopsticks. I felt like quite the display! Since then, I feel like people avoid sitting with me! I think they are afraid that they will have to try and speak English with me, so they avoid that possibility.
A part of me is quite uneasy about the fact that I won’t really have anyone to speak to here, until I meet some people (hopefully!) outside of the school. I am very fortunate, however, to know someone else living in this city for the year, someone I met while traveling in Cambodia just over a month ago. Saturday he came to the school to visit me and we went out that night to a bar downtown where I also met a few of his classmates from England. The only problem is that this city is MASSIVE…8 million people. It took Jamie about an hour and a half to get to my school, so I’m not exactly close to them. We also met some other people out on Saturday who told me that they have many Western teachers in the schools were they work; it kind of seems like I’m the only one around here going solo on this one.
I do feel a bit imprisoned here, however. There is tight security on the school grounds, with massive walls and gates all around campus. All the other teachers, as well as the students, live here. I have a 10 pm curfew and must be back on school grounds by then. I asked if I could come back later on the weekends so that I could go out, and they said I could come back ‘a little bit later.’ I sure hope that by that they mean 2 or 3 a.m. is ok! Haha. I did come back at 3 a.m. Saturday night before I knew about my curfew and had no problem being let into the gate, so hopefully it will be ok. Apparently the English teacher before me went out to a bar for a World Cup game and ended up drunk and passed out in front of the school yard, so they have concerns, but I think you all know I’m not likely to follow in his footsteps!
My schedule is pretty scattered throughout the week, with the busiest day being Monday, but I only teach 20 hours a week, so I foresee a lot of boredom in my future. Not quite sure how to fill all this time. It would be really great if I could somehow find another small job to do on the side, but I think the inconsistency in my schedule might make this pretty difficult. Coming out of an insanely intense anthropology Master’s program makes three hours of work seem like absolutely nothing, so I can imagine myself going a bit stir-crazy if I don’t find something else to fill up a bit of my time. I would love to take a Chinese class, or try to teach myself some Chinese. I also really wish I had a lot of books here and more DVDs/TV show seasons. I’ve seen everything I own soo many times! I’m going to try to find a bookstore with English books somewhere in the city.
I taught my first classes today. Six classes, all the same lesson. In fact, my other 14 classes this week will also be the same lesson as I have 20 different groups of students. Needless to say, the material is going to be ridiculously repetitive and boring for me, but the good thing is that I only have to prepare one lesson per week. The students are unbelievably shy. It is so difficult to engage them and get them to speak. This class is meant to be oral English only; no grammar, spelling, writing, reading, etc. But it’s very hard to conduct class when you have 50 little pairs of eyes staring at you without speaking. Class dynamics make some groups of students more fun than others, as is usual when teaching. I have a couple of classes that are a lot of fun, and some where no one wants to speak at all. Honestly, I’ve finished my first day of teaching feeling overwhelmingly frustrated. I was close to bursting into tears by the end of my sixth lesson. This experience is making me very nostalgic for Tanzania and my students there. I think it may be too early to really know how I will like this experience, but I do know that if I could actually make money teaching in Tanzania, I would have gone back. I am doing my best not to psych myself out, though, and not to dwell too much on thoughts of loneliness and language barriers. This is something to be expected when moving to a country where you can’t speak the language and very few people can speak your own. I am sure that in time I will make some friends and I will travel, and in the end it will be something very good for me. One student who spoke well and offered a lot of information, and who just started at this school, said something that resonated with me so much, and something I probably needed to hear at that moment. She said, “This is a very new experience for me. And I am missing my friends a lot. But even though it is hard, I know that this will open my eyes and it will teach me a lot about myself.” She is so very right.
[Below are images of my room and the school's campus]
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