First weeks of teaching and strange Teacher's Day celebrations

I have taught classrooms of children before, and even classrooms full of my peers (which is worse). But that doesn’t make it any easier when it comes to meeting a new class for the first time, and giving a good impression. The first thing I did was introduce my classroom rules. I realised immediately that I had overestimated their level of English and had to improvise my lesson from this point. The worst thing about my first week was the fact I just wasn’t used to such a basic level of English-speaking. So I would give out what I thought was a basic instruction and they would just laugh at me, because here is some stranger just talking at them in a foreign language. This was overcome by the second week as I learned to give instructions that they could understand. The students are also really withdrawn and shy. The style of teaching they have been exposed to since starting school is sitting and listening to lectures for an hour, so it is almost impossible at first to get them to talk and be creative. If I have a student stand up to answer a question, they behave as though they are being punished and just stare down at the floor and tremble until you back off. We all had a bit of a dilemma as to whether we should back off, in fear of making them cry, or persist. The problem is unless you persist, they learn that they don’t have to answer because eventually you will leave them alone. It’s just hard to watch them sometimes, you feel as though you’re torturing them. Apart from small problems like these, I have really enjoyed teaching, and I can feel myself getting better at it and learning what works.

I had them making ‘information cards’. In TEFL training, we were given an idea to give each child an index card and have them write their grade and class number, their English names, their Chinese names, their favourite subject and one fun fact about themselves. And then you can use these cards to choose children to answer questions and learn their names at the same time. I got great results and some of the cards were hilarious. They had clearly been left to their own devices when choosing English names; I had a ‘Hobby’ (you can see how that happened), a ‘Blower’, a ‘Carrot’ and a ‘Super Brother’. Some fellow ELAs and I discovered that we had quite a few ‘Hobo’s between us, but we recently found a textbook containing a character bear called Hobo, which explained everything. I also have a boy called Wendy. I decided to try and give English names out, but ran out very quickly. Currently in one class I have Phoebe, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Ross, Joey and Gunther. Some of the fun facts I got back were equally entertaining, some of which are in the images below.

You can see here how much trial and error went into deciding on the name 'Carrot'

Sue's great fun fact

I could never imagine myself being brave enough to ride a moped, but the longer I stayed here the more normal and efficient it seemed. Also, seeing some of the ELAs from last year riding one made it seem a bit more normal. They had told us their school gave them one and when I went to check out my school, I asked ‘Driver’. He asked how many years I had been in China, when I responded ‘3 weeks’ he said he was responsible for me and I was not yet used to China’s traffic, so basically, no. But when I got home I found out that Ant had been given one by his school. It was terrifying just being on the back. I felt so vulnerable being surrounded by crazy Chinese traffic whilst hanging off the back of a little electric bike. I had a little go myself the first time we had it, just on the pavement. I still haven’t driven it myself on a main road, but hopefully soon I’ll pluck up the courage.

My first time riding the ebike

On Tuesday, we were told that Friday is ‘Teacher’s Day’, a Chinese national holiday celebrating teachers (a much respected role in China), and that we would not be working on Friday morning. Instead, we would have to go to another school for a ceremony and the boys would have to wear black trousers, a white shirt and a dark tie. The girls would have to wear a black skirt (no trousers, irritatingly) and a white shirt with a collar. We would all have to wear ‘black patent leather shoes’. So this was my first experience buying new clothes in China. Most of us didn’t even bother adhering to the strict dress code, but as I had nothing even slightly close, I had to buy a white shirt and some black shoes (which definitely were not leather). So we all turned up dressed in a mix of patterned/blue/collarless shirts and a range of different bottoms. We met at the Bureau, where the girls were given a blue silk scarf each. We then got the tube to a different building (dressed like a gang of Mormons), where we were taken to conference room. One lady came around and tied our scarves, leaving us looking like air hostesses, and another came around with stockings and told us we had to wear them. We went to the toilet, had a rant which concluded we were not going to wear them and then went to sit back down, where we were then told to put lipstick on. We just shook our heads, dumbfounded. After this, we had to go outside and stand with lots of Chinese people and were positioned as if for a class photo (I still have no idea who these people were). Then in front of cameras, we had to repeat a chant (in Chinese) and hold a fist in the air. This was allegedly on the news, but only a very short snippet of it. This was definitely my strangest experience so far. I know it was for Teacher’s Day, but I still don’t really know what it was about. We just sort of turned up, did as we were told (mostly) and then went back to school. We were also given mooncakes as a gift.

Having pictures taken at the Teacher's Day ceremony (I'm second row down, fifth from the right)

Second in from the left

It was Ant's 23rd birthday on September 14th, so I had my first ever experience buying and eating a Chinese birthday cake. This was really hard to do without decent Chinese. In my lunch break at school, I went to a big bakery chain here called Holiland. All the cakes looked a bit 1950s; all white and covered with fruit. I found one vaguely chocolatey looking one called 'chocolate monsoon'. I asked if any of the staff spoke English which none of them did. So I dug up any bits of Chinese I knew that I thought might be useful. I said 'Xingqisan, wo qu zher...na ge' which means 'Wednesday, I come here...that one' and I pointed at 'chocolate monsoon'. They got the gist and on Wednesday I went to pick it up. When we tried the cake it wasn't very chocolatey and by no means a chocolate monsoon. We already knew that China did not do cake well but it was nice to look at. We had people over for beer pong (seeing as we had all the equipment) and that was our first China birthday celebration.

Birthday beer pong

Ant looking creepy with his Chinese birthday cake