Teaching High School

Since one of the old university teachers is back from holiday all our schedules were moved around. Mervin, who has been teaching his own university classes, is now teaching most of my old university classes. And Charles, who is back from a month-long holiday, is now teaching some of Mervin's old classes and his own. Naturally none of it makes too much sense. So as of now I am only teaching one class at the university. Who knows what will happen next week. I didn't even have a chance to give my students my QQ number!

Instead of teaching university I was assigned to teach at two high schools with Sarah and Lissette. The schools are known as 'factory' schools here at Aoqi. I have no idea why that is since the name of the schools have nothing to do with factories. They are notorious for having big classes and bad students, leading to a great attitude to walk in with.

I was pleasantly surprised with Factory No. 2, where I taught four classes in the morning. The classes are only 40 minutes, which is nothing compared to the 95 minute university classes I'm used to. Aoqi provided us with a module to teach, but naturally they failed to send copies to the school in time so none of the students had them. I ended up using some of my university lesson plans and teaching sports using charades and doing some tongue twisters. They love tongue twisters here and applaud whenever you say one really fast. The whole lesson is just so different from the Chinese way of teaching so the students seem to have a great time.

Factory No. 2 and some students:

In the afternoon I taught five classes at Factory No. 1. It was more of the same thing, but these students actually had the modules. It turns out they were pretty boring so I didn't do most of it and opted for some hangman instead. The students at this school were much more boisterous and noisy. My throat is hurting from talking so loudly!

Some students in a class at Factory No. 1:

I'm pretty exhausted from teaching nine classes but I wanted to share some of the highlights from the day:

-In my one all-girls class we sang the first verse of Taylor Swift's 'Love Story' together.

-Singing 'Baby' by Justin Bieber to the class since I agreed to sing a song if they did. They did.

-Trying to teach the macarena when they asked me to dance.

-Listening to students sing some Linkin Park and Adele.

-Receiving hugs from lots of my students after a class.

-Deflecting questions about China versus Japan. I didn't really feel like getting into that.

-Posing for numerous photos with students.

-When walking down the hallways I was stared at like crazy. I actually felt like a celebrity or like Waldo in Where's Waldo.

-I was called out numerous times for writing with my left hand. Apparently that is not cool here. I only had one student in a class of 70 who was left-handed and he's the only other person I've met in China so far who writes with his left hand.

-A student gave me a bunch of mini notecards with pictures of the American flag and British flag as a present. So sweet!