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Published: March 15th 2009
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Jiang Hua Senior Middle School #2
I teach in the white building on the front left and Steve teaches in the pink and white building in the back right. The building with the observatory (that doesn't work) is the office building. Steve and I have been teaching for 3 weeks now in Jiang Hua. It's not the original town we thought we were going to, but it's not too far away from Jiang Yong. Jiang Hua is a small city located in southern Hunan province and it's a short walk to the outer edge of the city where there are green rocky hills, lowland farms growing rice, vegetables, greens, and mushrooms, and a large silty river. The weather seems to change very quickly at least at this time of year. In our first three weeks here it's changed from warm and humid to very chilly, to rainy, to chilly, to warm, to cold, to rainy, to cold and sunny and then it was a nice warm sunny day today. I think these very quick changes in weather have made us more susceptible to getting sick. It seems like we've been sick in one form or fashion since we've arrived in JiangHua. We trade off having food poisoning or some sort of sinus infection at a time. I think it's just taking time for our bodies to get used to the new place and the local bacteria here. There are plenty of pharmacies
Steve
in the rocky hills above a village in town which can give us both western and traditional Chinese medicine.
The school that we teach at is called Jiang Hua Senior Middle School #2. It has about 3500 students. There are 3 levels of Senior Middle school students, Level 1, 2, and 3. I teach level 1 and Steve teaches level 2. Level 3 does not get a Foreign English Teacher because all their time is focused on passing their graduation and University entry exams. Steve teaches 16 classes and I teach 17 classes a week. There's about 60 students in each class, so we each see about 1000 students each week. Because there are so many students, to help with crowd control, the students stay in the classroom and the teachers move from classroom to classroom. The students are at varying levels of English comprehension. There are very good classes and very bad classes and a bunch of in betweeners. Generally, the students are nice and respectful of us, but in some of the very bad classes we have naughty students that ignore us and talk during the lecture. Some of the better, more ambitious students find us during lunch break to practice their English. It's
a mixed bag here.
The teachers here are very nice to us. There are many that can speak English and they chat with us in between periods in the teacher's lounge. They often invite us out for dinner on the weekends. Last weekend was International Women's Day and the Level 1 female teachers all got Sunday off (there are classes 7 days a week here but Steve and I only teach Mon-Fri). So they took us on a bike ride to country where there was a special tree park with some unusual and old trees. The largest tree was 800 years old, and the oldest was 2300 years old. Then we had lunch, played cards, went to dinner, and then to sing some karaoke. They had us out all day and night! Thankfully, we were with a bunch of mothers and their young daughters, so the night ended at 10pm. Although we were tired, we had a lot of fun.
This weekend we found out there are two other foreign teachers in Jiang Hua. They are a younger couple from England. We met up with them on Saturday afternoon and had a lovely talk about life in Jiang
Hua. We also traded teaching stories and suggestions for lessons and classroom management. We are happy to have some western people to spend some time with here, although they'll be leaving at the end of the semester. We'll be sad to see them go.
I hope everyone is doing well back in the States. Love and Hugs to you all!
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Hannah
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Great photos
Sounds like it's been quite the journey thus far. What an amazing number of students you are dealing with! Hope you don't have to grade papers for all of them ;) Let me know when your Skype is working so we can have a proper chat. LOVE!! Hannah