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Trip Start Oct 05, 2008 Trip End Ongoing Next
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  Quzhou, China
Sunday, May 13, 2007

3 weeks in and we're finally down to the nitty gritty. Cade is now a teacher - well sort of. Caretaker or child minder or even entertainer might be a more accurate explanation for what I do, but teacher is the official title so i'll go with it, regardless of whether my students are really learning anything or not.

I'm one of an increasing number of westerners drawn to this vast and mesmerising land to teach English. In the lead up to next year's Beijing Olympics demand is exploding and if a school can advertise itself as having a foreign English teacher on staff, then it's almost a license to print money. Parents rush to send their kids to these schools to be taught by people like me, whose only qualification is that they grew up learning English and not Swahili. If these parents actually saw what goes on in these classes they may be a little less keen to part with their hard earned yuan.

The school i'm teaching at is Shuyuan Middle School. It caters for around 1500 students from around 13 to 16 years of age or thereabouts. Apparantly the school is only about 4 years old and considered modern, though given some of the antiquated facilities, i'd hate to see what's considered old. Anyway everyone is extremely friendly and i'm treated as a celebrity around these parts, which is a little overwhelming to begin with, but becomes almost intoxicating after a while. I struggle to reconcile the fact that at home i'm a complete nobody who came to China through lack of anything else to do and here it seems the only person who's more admired than me is Chairman Mao!

Given my somewhat undeserved hero status at the school, it was no suprise that my first day in the classroom was a little more exciting for the students than for me.

Oops! I've interrupted class again.

My superiors politly informed me after I got here that I would be teaching at not one, but two schools, so my first morning as a teacher was actually spent across town at New Century Junior School. Predictably the first class was an anti-climax. My class of Grade Two's were giddy with excitment as I walked into the room, but then had to sit and watch me curse and swear as I realised there was nowhere to plug in my laptop and hence no lesson. I'd come up with an introductory lesson which involved me showing a whole heap of photo's from home on my laptop and explaining them to the students. Alas, the only English words those kids would've learnt were 'fuck' or bullshit' or 'fucking bullshit'. Better than nothing I suppose. And they didn't seem to mind. They just sat there with big stupid grins across their faces as though they'd been fed some ecstacy just prior the start of class.


Thankfully things improved over the rest of that day and for the rest of the week, though by the end of it I was thoroughly sick of explaining to the kids that it is actually possible to have brothers and sisters and that a dingo is not a dog. I also found my voice becoming hoarse. You have to speak the same way you do when you talk to little kids. Slowly and clearly and with simple words. This takes a toll on the throat especially when you're shouting above a class of 15 year olds who are still in raptures over the picture of a Koala you've just shown them. It was eerily familair of my time at school - an agitated teacher yelling at a class of teenagers to shut up.

Peace!

In fact the whole week was like weird out of body experience. It's amazing that despite massive cultural differences, some things are the same wherever you go and the dynamics of a school classroom is one of those. There's the chalk and blackboard. The desks and the chairs arranged in rows facing the front. Then there's the kids. The cool ones, the nerdy ones, the pretty ones, the ugly ones and the bad ones. They're all there and they're all the same. I felt like i'd been transported back a decade to when I was in high school, only now I was writing on the blackboard and not staring at it. I was the one calling for quite, when I used to make the noise.

Fortunately some things are different. I don't have to do any marking or set assignments. I don't have to go on duty or excursions and there are no school camps. I make up my own lesson plans, which aren't designed to actually make the kids fluent English speakers, but to just keep them entertained and hope they pick up a few words along the way. I want to make the lessons fun - a release from the relentless learning they experience the rest of the time. That's another big difference. These kids go to school from 7AM until 9PM - 14 hour days! The ones who live in the dorm where my appartment is get up for P.E at 6AM, head off for class an hour later, then once school finishes it's straight back to bed and lights out. I reckon if i'd experienced that when I was in high school, i'd either be a doctor or in a mental assylum. Probably the latter.

I still haven't signed my contract or even obtained a working visa yet, so I shouldn't get too comfortable, but after the initial shock to the system, i'm growing to love this peculiar place. I've made friends with some of the teachers at the school and i've grown accustomed to people staring at me like i'm an animal at the zoo. Being bombarded with 'hello' 10, 000 times a day doesn't bug me the way it used too either. My resistance to Chinese cuisine has worn off and my appetite has thankfully returned, though I can't see myself consuming raw fisheads in the school dining hall anytime soon.

I came here essentially because I wanted something different and on that front it's already a rousing success.

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Shuyuan Middle School

The courtyard

The dining hall gang

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