It's only Tuesday... It feels like I haven't had a weekend in months and I've only worked for two days since my last vacation. In all honestly, Tuesday's are not too bad at all. Every Tuesday I teach at two different schools in the Zhongshan District. The first is Lao Hu Tan Primary School and the second in Zhongnan Primary School. All in all, I can't complain too much about Tuesdays for a variety of reasons. For starters, no morning walk because the bus stop is right by my apartment and I start later so I usually leave around 8:15.The biggest reason I enjoy Tuesdays though is because I love the Hu Tan School. The students try the hardest, they care the most, they are always well behaved and, for the most part, they are actually pretty funny kids. Also, one thing I forgot to mention is that the usual English teacher (the one who teaches each class on the 4 days I'm in a particular school) usually sits in my class. They are there to help, translate, and discipline for me, as needed. At Wang Hai, the teacher usually sleeps and only yells at the kids when they are so loud that they wake her up. She's a great lady, but she gives me complete control of the class. While this sounds good, I prefer to team teach with their usual teacher because the students don't seem to get 'language shock' only hearing English. Hu Tan is the only school in which the teacher and I totally click and work amazingly together. She's an older woman who has quite a bit of Western philosophy under her belt for never having left China. When I turn to right on the board to take a sit of tea, she jumps in and translates (only the words they don't know) to keep them from talking in the down times. At that school, I teach three Primary 6 classes.
Also, today, like most days, I ate lunch with the Hu Tan English teachers. All of the English teachers like eating/ talking with me at lunch just about life. They also usually try to set me up on a date with the 4th grade English teacher, which I have yet to fight. She's 22, just moved to Dalian and is fairly attractive. The only downside is that she's incredibly shy and thus our talks are very short and un-romantic to say the least. You can't make 'Yesterday, I washed dishes' sound sexy in China. Fact. (As a side note, I'm curious to discover the kinds of new readers to the blog I will have seeing as I have used the words 'Chinese', 'shock', 'girls', and 'sexy' in the same blog post. I feel a little sorry for them, disappointed and horny is a bad mix of emotions. Now that I've added the word 'horny' to the internet alphabet soup, I'll have hundreds of hits.)
Anyway, the first picture is one I took from Hu Tan (with means something like 'port' or 'bay' in Chinese) while I was attempting to take one of the awesome coast near the school. Unfortunately, there is some construction going on and the view was blocked. Instead, I noticed during the morning exercise break that the students were all choreographed dancing. Every class had their unique dance routine an old American song from the '70's. I'm not even sure what the song was. Apparently, the school is being reviewed by the Education Board tomorrow and its customary to have a big dance show for them, that's China. I thought it was funny/adorable, so I took a picture.
After lunch I had to forgo my post-lunch nap to take a bus to my next school, Zhongshan Primary. Zhongshan is a horse of another colour completely. The school has only one English teacher that I've seen and her English is very limited. The students aren't as advanced, so its hard for me to have as much fun with them because of the extreme language barrier. Even though I also have two Primary 6 classes in that school, the difference is like night and day between my morning and afternoon classes. For the most part, I'm in and I'm out in no time and I don't stick around. I feel really bad for the school because its rather poor and I know they could be spending their money more wisely than on me. The students aren't getting anything from me but headache. The principal sat in on one of my classes (something which has happened at most of the other schools already) so maybe she'll notice that without the proper basis in language, I'm wasting every one's time. On the bright side, I live within spitting distance from the school, so I have barely any walk home afterwords.
This evening I had Chinese class in the evening downtown in our companies office. As part of our compensation, our company treats all of the teachers to free English lessons twice a week (every Tuesday and Thursday). Everyone but Kailey usually attends. The classes are VERY beginner which makes them great for most of us, but a waste of time for her. During that time she usually just practices her Chinese by shooting the shit with the Chinese staff, namely Jonah. I guess everyone wins.
Class went pretty well, which only means I didn't suck as much as I usually do. Progress I suppose. After class, I went to dinner with Kailey and Ashley at some hole in the wall restaurant. I ate lamb, something I usually do at least three times a week now, and it was amazing. Lamb is one of the few things that I eat that Kailey knows how to order, thus my love of adorable meats has been born out of necessity. The three of us then went to Dairy Queen, I had an Oreo blizzard and then came home to lesson plan for a few hours. I'm teaching at Si Shi Junior School tomorrow, which is my absolute favourite. My Junior 3 (9th grade) class is my saving grace but more about them tomorrow.
As a lark, I decided to look over my attendance sheets to see how many students I had in total... After I added them all up, I came up with a quick list of numbers to explain my alcoholism. Picture 2 is just a picture of Dalian, over which I have earned the following stats:
I teach at 6 different schools (5 Primary, 1 Junior)
5 different grade levels (5th-9th)
My largest class is 70 students, smallest 26 and my average is 46.7
I have 26 different classes totaling 1,238 students. YIPPEE!!
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