(Long) updates

Well we’ve come a long way from that first week I was inevitably late to every class because I kept getting lost in my school.  Some of the teachers still send student escorts to fetch me just in case though.  It’s hard to believe it’s been seven months in China already, but here we are in March.  So I thought I would give an update as to what my life is like.

Teaching is getting easier and harder.  Easier because I’ve gotten into the swing of things and every time is not a completely new experience for me.  I know which classes I have what days, and can even identify some of the 1,000 students by their class – which is more difficult than it sounds because there are four classes per grade.  It still takes me an hour or two to lesson plan for the grade but it’s because I’m busy finding funny pictures for the ppts rather than because I’m desperately searching all the teaching websites to find a clue as to what I’m doing.

Harder because I’ve learned enough now to know what it is I’m not great at, classroom management being number one.  Which as any real teacher will tell you is the most important thing you need to be able to do.  If I’m alone in a class of 40-50 students and they decide they want to be naughty and not work that day, I haven’t a hope to stop that.  It doesn’t sound like anyone here has phenomenal ideas as to how I would accomplish that though, so at least I know I am far from alone amongst the foreign teachers. 

I’ve also accumulated some extra students.  I started tutoring a couple first grade boys and that’s been an experience in the opposite way of what you’d think.  I’ve having much more trouble socializing with the family than teaching the boys!  Perhaps my biggest discovery so far is that the language barrier is the smallest and easiest of the barriers here.  Customs and cultural norms are much more difficult to overcome.  It still feels like the Twilight Zone because of that.  For the tutoring gig, I’ve learned that you can’t simply come for an hour or two and tutor their children.  They insist on giving me dinner (and so far I haven’t found cause to say no!) but then if I don’t eat to the point of exploding they assume I hate the food.  The first time I was there they apologized at least a thousand times for the home cooked meal, which of course had no problems, quizzed me on what foods I “actually” liked, and then took it a step further and made me a second meal after the tutoring to see if I would like that better!  No matter how many times I insisted I like the food, they would not believe me.  I felt it was ridiculous, but clearly I was making some kind of fox paws ( J ).  I just hope they weren’t actually offended!

Language barriers are definitely the least of the barriers.  Between my experiences and other colleagues’ that much is clear.  We see now why people discuss the great East-West cultural barriers.  It makes for interesting experience from a forensic point of view but is very frustrating and difficult for us living.  Everything from the above meal to the extremely sexist norms of behavior are making us more home sick!  At least our strange cultural ideas are familiar to us and more comfortable.

On a positive note, we are sensing the coming of the end of our time here and are making an effort to get more weekend trips in.  You saw our Kaiping trip a couple weeks ago, and we have more planned for the near future.

It will have to wait until after March though, because some of us are super busy putting on a play.  That’s right, we are staging Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night this month.  We’ve been working on it for a long time because of vacations and scheduling issues, but we finally get to perform.  I don’t know how happy I am about that because I have an awful lot of lines as Olivia and zero acting experience!  It’s pretty stressful, I just don’t want to embarrass myself!  Luckily very few, if any, of our audience of foreign teachers and interested Chinese would recognize a mistake in the lines.  The would be more comforting if I hadn’t been an English Lit major – the lines are the only easy part for me!  Haha.  I bet it will go well, we are excited to get it rolling.

Well, this post alone has taken over a week to write because of busy schedules and a spring cold that’s been circulating, so I will leave it here.  I’ve made the decision to not come back next year, at least not to this city or as a primary school teacher.  My return date is mid-July, and it’s sounding more and more desirable!

Miss you all, I’ll try to get more shorter posts in here as we go.