Professor Maureen

Wow. I never realized just how difficult teaching is! I suddenly have a lot more respect for my professors and all the other teachers I've ever had! The Zengcheng teaching trip was an amazing learning experience.

There were 9 of us going on the teaching trip - 5 of us were white, and the other four were Chinese/Japanese. The bus ride to Xintan (the first city we taught at) was miserable because it's really cold here right now, and they were blasting the air conditioning. We had slight issues upon reaching Xintan because we couldn't find the van that was supposed to meet us. Half an hour (and one coffee at a cafe) later, we found out that our escort had been waiting for us at the hotel for the entire time. Whoops.

Anyways, I was under the impression that we'd be given some instructions or some kind of idea as to how good these children's English was. Ha. Not. The next thing I know, we drive into a school full of 14/15 year olds and are told to go and teach.

David (another Canadian) and I, teamed up and braved the first class together. It was a painful experience. It wasn't too horrible, but we hadn't planned anything to do, and we assumed these kids had semi-decent language skills.... Which they did, but not at the same time. What I'm trying to say is that the kids knew all kinds of English words like "Important" and animal names, but they couldn't form sentences or understand the games we wanted them to play. It was strange though, everytime I'd emphasize a word, they'd repeat it after me. You could totally see the memorizing techniques the chinese use in their schools.

Luckily the first class only lasted an hour, so afterwards we met up with our friends and exchanged stories on what we had just taught and whatnot. Sadly it sounded like all the other classes had gone better than ours, but oh well. The second class went a lot better. We played games like Hangman and charades - I had prepared some flash cards with actions/animals/jobs on them, and we made the kids get up and act them out.

Thankfully due to all the prior delays, we were running behind, so we only had to teach the two classes and then got to flee. We were given time to go check into our hotel (which was pretty swank for a chinese hotel!), go for dinner, and then go shopping. (We accidentally lost one of our chinese guys when we went shopping - we couldn't find him for an hour but finally did manage to run into him again.)

I'm happy to report that the next day's teaching went much much better. We had had a meeting the night before to brainstorm ideas of what to cover/teach the next day. So this time we had a list of ideas to pull from. Another bonus was that this time we divided into groups of three rather than pairs, because we were teaching younger students this time (7/8 year olds) and figured it would be better to have a chinese speaker in each group.

We played silly games like "Heads and shoulders knees and toes" (adding more vocabularly as we went), taught them "Twinkle twinkle little star" (sadly, David, Minnie and I ALL forgot the words to the song and had to make them up quickly), "Row Row Row your Boat," hangman and some other games. It was a lot of fun and we were able to keep their attention for longer. David had also brought some pictures of animals, so we quizzed them on that.

In our second class, it was a bit more difficult to keep control of the kids. They were super hyper (note to self: make a suggestion that candy ISN'T a good reward for answering questions). Plus there was one boy in the front who you could tell was the class bully. He kept yelling at everyone and none of the girls would answer questions because of him. We had to start answering by rows because he was being obnoxious.

So even though we had a rocky start on the first day, I'm pleased to say I had a good time. After our classes, we would go out into the hallway and snap a gazillion photos of the cute kids. They were constantly jumping into the photos, each trying to get closer and closer to the camera. I managed to pawn off a bunch of my canadian handouts on the local teacher, who informed the children (all of them were fighting over the things) the people with the next highest marks could have them.

Please do not send any more Canadian paraphernalia. I appreciate getting it, but I haven't met new people to give this stuff away too! LOL, I have a drawer full of it still even though I've given a lot of it away.

After most of the kids had left, we descended down into the school's courtyard and chilled for a bit. A few of the young girls had stayed around and asked to take some photos with us before the boys came. LOL, so we obliged happily. They were so CUTE!

I then astounded a few of them by asking them where the washroom was in chinese. That's when I confirmed that no, my chinese is NOT as a good as a small child's. LOL. They were chattering away to me in mandarin and I could only catch a few words here and there. They kept giggling whenever I told them I didn't understand. LOL. So CUTE!

We ended up chilling around the city for awhile which was good because Zengcheng is very NON-touristy - people kept staring at us while they passed us. It was neat to see a truly chinese city with little to no English. Plus we got to walk around little market areas (kind of like a rouger/tougher Mong Kok).

Our bus ride back was a bit more hectic because first, the roads were under MAJOR construction. I felt like we needed a freakin' 4x4 because we were bouncing around so much. Plus we got lost so it took us a lot longer to find out bus. Secondly, the german guy in our group lost his bus ticket so he did nothing but gripe about it on the way back. You lost the ticket dude, so pay the price and shaddup. Argh.

And of course, how could I go to China and NOT return with a bathroom story? Zengcheng had the most TERRIFYING bathrooms (View 1, View 2) I had ever seen. I've seen the hole in the ground variety before, doesn't bother me. It smelled bad, but not as bad as places like bus stations or immigration. What did weird me out was the whole "no walls/no doors" policy. Plus the little partitions that were there, were so short that even if I went into them, I had to squat before taking down my pants. Too funny. Plus, the bathroom at the second day's school was even scarier. Same concept (no doors/walls/hole, etc.), but this one had flies all over it. The wall was covered with them. So scary!!!!!!

Oh, and one more note! I'm going to Shanghai this weekend! (Yeah, it surprised me too!) Last Monday I ran into a girl I went to Beijing with, and she mentioned that she was going to Shanghai with some of her friends and invited me along. And today, she told me they were going this weekend, so I said I'd go. Yay! I'll only be gone for 4 days, but I think that'll be more than enough for Shanghai.

Catch ya on the flipside!