School Tour

OK, this is going to be a two-part post. First some background…

During a typical day for the students, classes start at 7:50 and run until 5:00. There are 8 45-minute lessons a day with 10 minute breaks in between (except after the second lesson, when the student go outside for 20 minutes of exercises and some kind of daily speech, as seen in the video) as well as a two-hour break for lunch. I usually go home for lunch but most of the students (remember, there are 2500 or more) descend upon the nearby restaurants.

I am scheduled to teach 22 lessons a week spread out Monday through Thursday. Most of the lessons are taught at the high school but I also teach 4 classes at a nearby middle school. The average class size is around 60 so I’m teaching over 1300 students.

The students have a Chinese English teacher so I have found that they are quite good at reading English (especially when they get to the upper classman level) but their listening and speaking abilities are lacking, which is where I come in. They need me to have the students practice their auditory and oral skills. I think this would be a great job for a speech-therapist! Even though I am technically teaching three levels, my lessons will basically be the same, which means I teach the same lesson 22 times. This can be a little monotonous.

There are two uniforms that are worn and although I haven’t figured out exactly who wears what yet, I’m pretty sure it distinguishes the upper and lower classman. Some of the students wear a track suit and the others wear army fatigues (!). They don’t seem quite as hip with American culture as I might have thought but they are really into basketball.

Now some details…

One of the funniest things to me is that the students often applaud when I enter the room. This is certainly not something that happened while I was teaching in the States! For my first lesson, I introduced myself with pictures. They were very impressed with the picture of my house and I almost always got an applause when I showed the picture of me with my 4 siblings (most of the Chinese only have one sibling if any). You’re heroes, Mom and Dad!

I left a few minutes at the end of each class for them to ask me questions and one of the funniest things they asked me was to sing. I think at least half of the classes wanted me to sing for them. Eventually I asked them why they all wanted me to sing and I was told, “Pretty girls sing pretty.”

At the middle school, I had a few students pull hair off my shirt as I passed them and some of them asked me to sign autographs, including autographing their English-Chinese dictionaries. I suppose though, the culmination of my fame was when a reporter visited one of my classes to get some footage for the local news.

The video is from this week’s lesson. I had the students choose an English name then introduce themselves to me…including a proper handshake. I have some good stories to tell about this as well but that will have to wait until next week!