Sorry for the lack of entries this past week. Been a little crazy getting into the swing of everything. My goal is to do 2 entries this weekend to make up for it. This entry will be a status update and the next will be general first impressions of China. Enjoy!
When I arrived in Dongying I got my dorm room. It had been cleaned to Chinese standards which basically means they had swept. The faucets were nearly black which almost looked like they would be stuck that way but I went to a big grocery store and bought a whole bunch of cleaning supplies and I managed to get everything reasonably clean. I have pics of my room online now.We had 3 days of training which consisted of a number of pointers from experienced teachers but mostly consisted of us actually having to teach classes. It started with 2 of us working together for a class and then we each had to do one ourselves. Since the Weifang people were here as well there were 7 of us doing this so there was a lot of watching other classes. The problem with the whole thing was that during that week only the grade 1 kids were around to be experimented on. Also, since we only taught them once we couldn't really establish rules of any sort and many of the kids had never been in a school before so didn't know what was expected of them. They also spoke NO English. Made for an interesting (read: awful) time. Somehow though I survived despite my class being off the wall even before they got to me. Fortunately a few of the other teachers had the same problem. Made for some interesting classes.
Early this week I had to go back to Weifang to get my resident permit since I was originally hired in Weifang. This was also the time 2 new teachers were arriving for Dongying. The people sent to pick them up at the airport spoke no English so I had to go along to say hi. It meant driving from Dongying to Qingdao to Weifang which was a lot of driving. I stayed overnight in Weifang then was brought back to Dongying Wednesday afternoon. This was a bit of a problem since classes started on Thursday and I had to clean and decorate my room.
I had been told that my TA would clean my classroom for the first time and then it would be my responsibility after that. When I got there mid Wednesday afternoon it was filthy. Took quite awhile to get it clean but I managed. I wasn't going to call my TA about it. I had met her, and she is incredibly skittish. She's about 90 lbs I'd guess. Actually pretty cute but seems freaked out of foreigners. She's the kids' Chinese English teacher and yet her English isn't too great but she did manage to get my chalk and a mop when I asked so that's something!
Anyway, I got the room cleaned and partially decorated. We had been told that it's a good idea to come up with some sort of group incentive for the kids. We give stickers for good individual effort but it's good to have something for the class as a whole so that the good kids will put pressure on any trouble makers. Matt (the guy who's been here awhile) uses a "gumball" system where he awards an imaginary gumball when the class listens well or beats another class at a game. I didn't want to do the exact same thing so I thought awhile and came up with the idea to use the characters from Pixar's Cars movie and have them "race" around a track. I'd move them forward if they did well or back if they were not listening. I hoped the kids would get into it and other teachers seemed to think it was a good idea. I will take pictures of it at some point soon.
Thursday was the first day of classes. My schedule showed I had class the first period at 8:45 but no one showed up. I found out later they had given me the wrong one and I actually don't have class until 9:50 on Thursdays which is nice apart from the maddening early music. More on that later. The first 2 days of classes were just times to get to know each other. The actual lessons start next week. So I used the day to tell them how I'd run my class as well as have fun with some games. I tried a number of different ones with mixed results but overall the classes went fairly well I think. As expected there are 1 or 2 classes that should be awesome and 1 or 2 that will be a bit frustrating and the rest in the middle (I have 6 total).
Oh ya, I don't think I mentioned here. Things changed for me again. When they told me I would be coming to Dongying they said I'd only have 20 classes and that was their big selling point. Last week I was told that it's not really fair to make me (a new teacher) teach 2 grades so now I'm only doing 1 grade but I have 24 classes a week. It means I only have to plan half as many lessons which is nice but an extra 4 classes kind of sucks. I think this qualifies as "just a thing."
Well that's pretty much the technical updates to this point. I hope to do another entry either later today or tomorrow about some of the more fun things and cool things I've noticed around China.
Thanks for reading!
Wiseguy1
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