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Published: October 13th 2010
My employer, Blue Sky Tengfei, is pretty new on the scene and has several locations. Their location in Yutai (which I was just beginning to get used to) is the newest of the Blue Sky Tengfei locations but is not quite ready for prime time, there had been a very successful summer school there. Some kids who had attended summer school in Yutai had missed a few classes and had to do "make up". Those were the classes that I had been teaching and they are completed. I had nothing to do, so they simply moved me to a location where I was needed. Everybody knew about this but me. With scarcely fifteen minutes of notice, I was asked to pack my belongings and be ready to go. Uh, OK.
The only way to survive as a Foreign teacher in China is remember to
"go with the flow". If one expects prior notice, reasoning or explanations, then that one is going to be a sadly disappointed Joe. To be honest, I was not all that thrilled with living in Yutai anyway. It was kind of a dump.
After I packed my stuff, we were whisked away to the town
of
Jinxiang. While there is a Blue Sky Tengfeu center in Jinxiang, what was in store for me was visiting a public Middle School, grade 5.
Here's the deal: Why should only the upper middle class kids get to learn English? How about the normal, average kids? The ones who go to government run, public schools? For these kids, it is a much bigger deal: they have
never had a foreign teacher visit their school. They have never had one in their class. They had never had one make pig sounds to them. That would soon change.
George, a fellow "teacher" from the Jinxiang location (George is a young Londoner fresh out of University) and I would be the designated visiting celebrities. George and I get along and have the same sense of humor. While we traveled through town towards the school, I spotted some sort of official government building, one whose only signage was an enormous red and gold hammer and sickle. "What party do you think they belong to?," I asked George "Tories?" He shook his head "Labour, most definitely" he deadpanned.
George and I each had two classes to teach; I had 5th graders
and George had the 6th graders. These kids had learned some English already but their pronunciation just wasn't quite there. Our jobs, I was told, was to make learning English appealing and fun. We were given bottled water and sequestered in a sort of a "green room" before "going on stage". Soon, it was showtime! The school Principal and Vice Principals were going to be watching from the back of the room. The "performance" was videotaped.
We have a teaching template to work off of, and once I had done the first step ("Warm up"), I had the audience in my hands. Jasmine and I worked as a team and she cued me whenever I forgot the next step. I did fine. Lots of slapstick. We timed the lesson just fine, there were no flubs and the audience roared with laughter. They also learned the words that we taught them. The next class went even better.
Afterward, we were invited to lunch. Not the school kids, just we visitors and the school's honchos.
We were hauled in a Hyundai to a nice restaurant and seated at a big banquet table in a private dining room. George and I were to sit on either side of the Principal, as we were the guests of honor. All of the school's administration were there, and toasts (of hot soy drink) were made in our honor. Food arrived. Then, more food arrived. Food kept arriving. Photographs of George and Joe were taken. More clinking of glasses. The food was the serious stuff: whole fish, rabbit, chicken, pork, duck and another damned turtle.
I avoided the turtle.
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debbie
non-member comment
these posts are great to read. Like your go with the flow point of view!