China Update

I arrived in China 4 days ago, and promptly lost one of my carry-ons at the gate at the Guanzhou airport. It had all my art stuff, including my sketchbook (D-: D-: D-:), my summer clothes, and my hair straightener. I probably won't see it again.

Prior, Rob and I drove the scenic route down the coast from Sunnyvale to LAX. Big Sur was absolutely stunning. The flight over was absolutely unpleasant and horribly shitty, probably due to it being the cheapest group rate flight available. Imagine the smallest, most crapped economy class seats, and then imagine them half that size. Tiniest seats. Ever. And probably stuffed with cardboard. As a bonus, rather that fly straight to Beijing or even just make a transfer in Tokyo, we flew 15 hours all the way south to Guangzhou, where we had to take out our luggage, recheck them onto domestic, and fly 3 hours back up to Beijing.

Anyhow, been here 4 days. The weather has been mercifully cool for summers in Beijing due to near-daily thunderstorms (trust me, it's a GOOD thing). I have an awesome roommate and have met a ton of new people. It feels like we've been much, much longer than 4 days. The afternoon we checked in from our flight, we had the rest of the day off, but we had class the next day. We have class on weekends, though we do have a day off each in the next two weeks where we're scheduled for tours. It's quite literally a TESL for Chinese boot camp, but understandable considering they have to whip us up into teachers or something like that the three weeks before we start work.

So my daily schedule consists of this:

7:00 Wake up
7:40-8:00 Breakfast buffet at the hotel restaurant
8:30-10:30 Advanced Chinese class
10:30-11:30 TEFL Theory class
11:30-1:00 Lunch break
1:00-4:00 Teaching English class to a summer camp
After 4:00 Go out to dinner, then do my assload of Chinese homework and lesson plans


And yes, we did get thrown into teaching our own class on our second day. There are 4 class levels for our students--Elementary, Junior High, Senior High, and University. They're actually paying for the summer camp, which is ironic because we are also paying to teach them.

I teach a class of 16 older Junior High kids or about 14 or 15 (more or less... throw in the random 25 year old and 30-something, and a 13 year old). It's intense, especially since we have to come up with 3 hours worth of lessons each day. I had a co-teacher for the first day and a half, but he was moved to teaching University level students because they were... um, revolting.

So apparently Peking University was advertising this camp as being more grammar based, and that they would have 4 teachers at once... not 4 teachers total. The students felt rather ripped off about it and anyway... I'm now teaching alone. It's really hard work, but my kids are for the most part great and usually eager to learn.

Chinese class has been a mixed bag. I actually know some Chinese from my mom teaching me when I was a kid. I definitely am much better at it now than I was when the plane landed, because I finally had some reason to brush up on it. But my class now has 3 non-native speakers... and for two of them it seems their reading/writing skills are actually below mine (Caroline, the third, is amazing... she is better than me and knows a lot more characters). So, it being a conversational class, they do conversation. Slowly. Explaining a lot of phrases. It's the equivalent of sitting through an English class where people are talking like they're talking to little kids about the economy. Hurts my head... and the teacher never calls on me because she says I already have it covered. So actually, today I didn't do anything except sit back and do exercises... the teacher even told me I could lay my head down and talk a nap.