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Published: August 16th 2008
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As I promised, this blog will describe the school. School still does not start for another week. This week, we are preparing our classrooms and going through orientation. The only teachers here so far are the Chinese teachers/parapros and an Australian teacher for the 3-4 year old class. The Australian teacher is in Chongqing because her fiancé works for the Hilton here. All of the teachers are young so far; I don’t think anyone is over thirty.
All of the classrooms are octagonal. The president of QSI likes this design because it lets in a lot of natural light. I will be teaching the 12 and 13 year old class. As of now I think I only have five students. Hard to imagine I know! I am a little concerned about how my classroom will run because I guess all of the students are at different places of study. I can’t wait for some of the other teachers to arrive so I can ask them questions. All of the Chinese teachers here teach the electives such as Chinese class, music and PE so their situation will be different from mine.
The school is located in University Town which is
like a town inside of Chongqing. I know there is a correct term to use for this. (It is like Chandler being a part of Phoenix.) Anyways, the two universities in Chongqing and also our international school are in University Town. From what I hear, they are expecting to have 200,000 university students by 2010. Even more amazing, this is only about half of all the university students in Chongqing. Our school in unique to QSI schools because the Chinese government asked for QSI to build the school here (QSI has three other school in other parts of China). QSI selected the architect and design for the school, but the Chinese government built it. As a result, I guess we get many important visitors from all over China interested in seeing our school.
The school is fairly large. When you walk in, there is a large circular mat with QSI Chongqing written on it. Hanging around this mat are flags that represent all of the nationalities in our school so far. For only having twenty or so students, you will see that there is quite a bit of diversity. So far I know I have students in my room
from Russia, France, Canada, China and the US. It turns out some of our students are Chinese, but were born abroad when their parents were living abroad so have a foreign passport. Anyone who comes to our school must have a foreign passport.
We have two security guards at our front gates. They are young Chinese women and are adorable. They are friendly as can be and are always trying to improve their English.
Today I worked on setting up my bulletin boards. I received no training on this! I think they turned out alright though. I don’t really know what to put up yet for the first day of school. Most of the materials we have are for the younger grades. Let me know if you have any suggestions because right now my boards are bare! I am working on class rules and consequences that I will post somewhere. Besides the classrooms, the school has a library (with all glass walls), a computer lab, a music room (all the walls are mirrors in this room) and a gym. We have both an indoor gym with a basketball court and an outdoor soccer field and track. We are
planning to start building a secondary school in the next five years.
The other thing that happened…that is really kind of embarrassing is that I fainted! I know this is turning into a bad habit of mine. I’m not sure what happened. I think I was getting sick on top of not having enough nutrients in my body. I have been eating, but for some reason I haven’t had much of an appetite and the foods I do eat do not seem to have much substance. We were on a tour of the school and I started feeling a little light headed and next thing I know I am on the floor of the computer lab. I have started taking vitamins and slept for like sixteen hours yesterday so hopefully this will not happen again. I also bought some higher calorie foods and drinks. They really do not have many dairy products here, which is going to be rough for me. I eat a lot of cheese normally and they have no real cheese here that I can find…only the kraft American cheese that comes in the individual plastic wrap. (I hate this…it is not real cheese!) I did
find some peanut butter so I can make peanut butter and jelly at my apartment.
I am also uploading some photos of signs in the grass around my apartment that I took today on my walk home. I thought you might find them interesting. You will find these signs every few feet as you walk along the paths outside my apartment.
The director’s wife came in today and the two of us are going shopping tomorrow at Walmart and Lotus (which is a grocery store/department store). I have not ventured out much by myself yet. I pretty much have only gone to the grocery store down the road alone. I feel safe, but I am worried about getting lost. I took a Taxi ride home alone today after going on some errands with some of the Chinese teachers. One of them told the driver where to go, but he became confused along the way and kept asking me which way to go. I of course had no clue. Fortunately, that day I had asked one of the teachers to write my apartment name down in Chinese. I was able to hand the driver this and he got me
home.
It is so peculiar because names are not the same here. Everyone and everything has a different name in Chinese and English. Normally proper names stay the same across languages, but not here. All of our students and staff have English names. These English names have no correlation to their Chinese names, they are just made up. Our guards for example were given English names by the school because they never had a need for an English name before. This seems very strange to me!
Also, we went out to dinner at the five star Holiday Inn tonight. Some of the choices on the buffet line were: rabbit in chile sauce, shark fin soup, pork ear something, and tons of weird fish/seafood options. There was not much I wanted to eat to say the least. On the positive side, I could have them grill me a little steak or chicken. There was also pizza, bread, vegetables and fruit. The portions are tiny here! Everything is a fraction of the size as you would get in the US.
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Wow! I am so amazed! Everything sounds so great over there. I am glad to see that you are fainting. Only 'cool' people like me and you faint unexpectedly.