teacher seminar

One of the last things I did in Songyuan was teach a section in an eight day seminar for 200 English teachers from Songyuan public schools. The teachers were all Chinese and taught mostly at the middle and high school levels.

My school sold the program to the education department, which the owner had deep ties to (recall Happy Songyuan English Speaking Contest). The seminar had four sections, with one foreigner teaching each: American Culture (my section), Classroom Language, Pronunciation & Intonation and Communication & Presentation. The teachers came to us in groups of 50 and we had each group for day and a half. At the end of the seminar each teacher was supposed to give a short presentation and there was a written test.

When I was first told about the seminar, the foreign teacher/business development consultant guy at my school that had helped the school's owner set up the whole thing said he had all the material and such for each section, we just had to present his stuff. The department of education ended up making changes to the length of the seminar and the desired content the night before we started, so a lot of that went out the window anyway, but once I went through my section of the "prepared" material, I ended up just tossing it anyway. The guy had literally just pulled headings and entire sections off wikipedia for each section. I am amazed as to how it fooled anyone as being a solid program of original material, but that is neither here or there. The material for me honestly read like it might not have even been written by an American, so I just made up my own.

Even though it was a lot of extra work that I essentially didn't get paid for, I really did love the seminar. It was a continuation of my favorite part of my regular Oil Adults 2 class, a mutual conversation about culture, so an opportunity for me to learn as well.

Having never taught in a public school, unlike most of my coworkers, I went into the seminar with little to no expectations, and I was STILL surprised. The English teachers did not speak English. Most of my regular students have a better grasp of the language than the teachers did. We foreigners had Chinese translators translating literally every word we said and translating the teachers' questions and such back to us. Many of them didn't even try to use English and speak directly to me.

In each section there were maybe one or two, three tops, people with a solid enough grasp on the English language to actually have a conversation with me. I knew that the focus for English language teaching in the Chinese education system is reading and writing, but the lack of verbal communication skills still came as a shock.

Over the course of the seminar, I was also surprised to learn that many of the teachers had not been to university and many of them had no English training at all (so the above made sense), they had been math or science teachers that the school just arbitrarily reassigned to teach English. And these were supposed to be the "best" English teachers in Songyuan. Scary.

The biggest surprises of the whole thing though came on test day. The four foreigners teaching consisted of myself, the business development consultant guy, the school VP and then another American guy in his early 30s. As usual, nothing was communicated to anyone ahead of time as to how the test would work logistically, but the other American guy and I figured between the development guy and the VP being there, everything would get figured out. Boy, were we wrong.

The morning of that day was for the individual presentations, which was easy enough, and the afternoon was for the written test. The first major problem came when the development guy and the VP never came back from lunch. And didn't answer their phones. And neither did the school owner. 

After about an hour's worth of running around trying to figure out if they were coming back or not and searching for an appropriate room to administer the test that wasn't locked (and yes, this did involve marching all 200 teachers all over a high school), we finally settled on keeping the teachers in their groups of 50 and keeping each group in a separate classroom to take the tests. That left the American, myself, a Chinese school admin and a Chinese TA to administer and monitor the 200 teachers taking the test in these four rooms.

Observing the testing process was mind blowing. Every single one of them would have failed in an American testing setting. They ALL cheated. They were taking out notes, phones, dictionaries and books. They were talking loudly to each other and walking around the room to see others' answers. I could literally hear them going down their answers sheets reading, "A, B, D, C, C, A…" to each other and trading test papers, not even trying to hide it. Nothing we said could stop them or even make them feel like they should bother trying to be discreet. The American and I were just blown away.

There was a short break after the allotted testing time and THEN the others from my school came back, finally, and we got everyone together into an auditorium. The American guy and I made the "I'm disappointed in you guys" speech, which I can't say I ever imagined I'd be doing to hundreds of other adults. We accepted some responsibility, but expressed just how shocked we were, why and what needed to change according to western standards.

Cheating is such an accepted part of culture here, but to see it in action like that, and from teachers no less… wow. It made me feel really depressed. Many of them couldn't even understand that they should be embarrassed.

field trips

In the past three weeks I've gone on two field trips with my favorite class (my only class actually, but I love them regardless!). The rule for field trips is theoretically "English only" and the majority of the class must go. That class is a really fun group with good chemistry and they also happen to be adults with really good English; I think of them more as my friends than my students.

Field trip number one was a picnic. It's been raining basically every day for the past month or two, but luckily on picnic day the weather was absolutely amazing. There was one point where we thought maybe it was going to rain, so we packed up all of our stuff, but we ended up just relocating our base.

Enough of my students have cars for them to have been able to drive us all about 30-45 minutes away from school near the river and Long Hua Temple, basically in the middle of nowhere (yay for nature and green things).

Yep, some cows were hanging out with us. They made fun of me for taking a picture of them though, "Haven't you ever seen cows?"

...and some farmers.

Everyone brought food or props or something; I was in charge of games. We played tradition American picnic/children's games (Capture the Flag, Telephone, Red Light Green Light), some Chinese games (some kind of awesome blindfold game and the card game all the old men always play outside) and some we all knew (Charades, Hot Potato, soccer, relay races, three legged races).

Class is supposed to be four hours, 8am to 12pm, on Sundays, which picnic day happened to be. My students picked me up at 8am and I think I got home from the post picnic dinner at 6:30pm. I got to hang out with people I really like all day, enjoy nature and great weather, be active and get paid for the whole thing. It was kind of awesome.

Field trip number two was to play badminton (with a sprinkling of ping pong) this past Sunday. We were going to have class from 8am to 12pm, do lunch and then go, but we ditched class an hour early for more game time.

My students all work for some subsidiary or other of CNPC, the big oil company here, and we went to one of their offices to play (none of them actually work together). His office was kind of nuts, it was in an old hotel and you could definitely tell, they hadn't remodeled the majority of it. The carpet was my first clue, and not just that there was carpet, even though you rarely find that here, it was that "main-hallway-of-a-hotel" pattern also. In his office there was a bathroom and a bed (granted it was a twin), but it had clearly been a hotel room. There was even the standard fire evacuation map on the back of the door.

The ping pong was in the same building, in what might have been a conference room. They had special sport flooring and maybe ten tables, with balls, paddles and homemade hoppers (like in tennis, containers on handles that you can push down on top of a ball and the ball pops into the container so you don't have to bend over to collect them all). It was legit.

I mostly stuck to the badminton. One of the guys came into the badminton room and he was really sweaty, I asked what he'd been doing and when he said playing ping pong I was sliiightly confused. And then I went to watch. They're really intense about ping pong. They put all kinds of crazy spin on the ball and stand literally almost a full table length away from the table to play.

In a separate building, in what appeared to have been an auditorium of sorts, the company had recently built the single badminton court. The guy who's office we were at said everyone could play for a half hour of each workday. Since it was the weekend, we had the place to ourselves. We ended up playing for something like five hours.

I keep meaning to tell them about Sunday Funday and forgetting. We're essentially starting the Sunday Funday Field Trip Series. Next up: bbq and strictly English ktv!

massage culture

After the trip to Chanchun the other week, my neck, right shoulder and half of my back were absolutely killing me and I couldn't turn my head at all. I ended up getting a massage at a foot massage parlor the day after I got back, getting acupuncture, cupping and a massage the following day from a therapist and getting another massage along with a scrub the day after that at a bath house. On top of all that, some friends and students had some other remedies for me as well.

This might make the whole thing seem a lot more serious that it really was, but it's really more of a reflection of the culture here. Chinese always want to go to the doctor for the littlest thing and are really big on taking care of your body. I think of it as "massage culture." Before coming to China, I'd say I've had less than 15 massages in my entire life. Here, I go about once a week, most of the foreigners do.

Foot massage places are kind of a hybrid between western pedicure salons and massage parlors. Pretty sure I've described one on here before, but oh well. They have rooms of varying sizes that you go in with your friends, there are a certain number of bed/cot type things in each. They all have pillows and heavy comforters. You can wear pajama type clothing that they supply, but usually you just wear your own clothes the whole time. The lights are usually on high and there is usually a tv playing a random program or the news.

First they soak your feet in a bucket that they put at the foot of your bed. While your feet are soaking, they give you a neck and shoulder massage. Massages here are not slow, deep, relaxing, or really any other adjective I might use to describe one in the States. If I had to guess, I'd say a lot of the people giving them here have no training or certification either. Massages are usually very hard, quick and vigorous. There is also a lot of shaking and thumping involved and maybe a little stretching. We took a new foreigner to the foot massage place when we went the other day and she absolutely hated it at first (as did I actually).

After that bit, you lay down and they massage your feet with lotion. Then they move up and do the rest of your body over your clothes, front and back. Foot massage parlors will usually also do guasha, cupping, ear candles and maybe acupuncture. They range in price, the one a lot of foreigners go to here is 60 kwai (so like $9.50) for 70 minutes. They are a great place to practice your Chinese, because they are a captive audience, they usually want to talk to you and sometimes they know a tiny bit of English.

The second place I went last week was to see an actual Chinese therapist. His office was in his home, which is normal here, and he had certifications, diagrams of the body and stuff like that on the wall that you might expect to see in a western therapist's office. One of my Oil Adults 2 students took me there, as he knew I wanted to try acupuncture.

When the guy explained to him what was wrong with my neck, he said I needed a massage, not acupuncture. The massage was great, definitely Chinese style, but he really got at the knots in my shoulders and gave me good advice (i.e. stop carrying my laptop everywhere). He cracked my neck and shoulders a LOT, much in the way I imagine a chiropractor would. At one point he was climbing up on my chair to hover over me, hugging my head while my student held my chair still and he told me not to be afraid, lol. It felt amazing.

Afterwards, he did some general acupuncture for me. He said I was very brave, many Chinese won't even try acupuncture. Typically if they do try it, it's only when something needs fixing or they are sick. He put maybe 30 needles in me and left them in for about 30 minutes. They didn't hurt going in, it just felt like pressure. If he would tap or twist them it felt kind of crazy. I could feel the needles in other parts of my body, where there were no needles, and when they moved it felt like I was getting shocked, radiating from the needles. Not in a painful way, more in a static shock kind of way. I can't say if I actually saw any effects from this after or in the next few days though.

After that, my student talked me into trying cupping (again). He asked if I had a high pain tolerance and when I said yes, he used the bamboo cups, which are said to be the most painful with the least give. They weren't painful exactly, just really uncomfortable, like they suck your skin in a lot tighter. I didn't have any really crazy bruising though, so the therapist said I was young and healthy. I have no clue how much that whole experience cost, because my student put it on his wife's account, ha!

The following day I got my third massage for the week at the bath house. This was my first bath house experience in China, I had only been to the one in Korea previously. I'd actually be wanting to go for a while, but all the females I know I either am not comfortable being naked around or they weren't comfortable being naked around friends. If I go with the guys, we can meet up in the coed parts where you wear pajama type clothes and play cards, go in the sauna, lay in heated rock beds together and talk, etc. but the other parts, like the showers, steam rooms and scrubs, I'd be alone for.

The bath house in Korea completely showed this one up. The women's area was small and more like a locker room than anything else. Chinese bath houses don't have pools on the ladies' sides, so really all you do is take a shower in a big room with everyone else and maybe get a massage or a scrub or something. My friend that had been before recommended a body mask if I was willing to spend some money, so I tried it and was pretty disappointed. I don't know that I'll go back. I was spoiled in Korea!

The final thing I tried to fix my neck were these patches with Chinese medincine that you stick on muscles that hurt and leave for maybe 12 hours. There are different varieties and I have no idea what the medicine is. It just seeps into your pores. One of them had a really herby smell and made the area around it kind of cold, which was cool. I think that one helped the most.

fortune teller

I was out to dinner a few weeks ago with a group of student from my Oil Adults 2 class, and one of them mentioned that she was wearing an amulet from a fortune teller (can't for the life of me recall how this came up). Apparently if something bad is going on in your life, a fortune teller will write you a good luck charm that you tie into your underwear and wear around every day. Naturally what with this being such a foreign concept, I wanted to go so my student took me earlier this week.

The fortune teller works out of her home. She has been doing this many, many years now and is known for it in the community. All of her clients find her by word of mouth and she is quite busy.

My student translated for me and took notes in Chinese so I could have someone else re-translate for me later if I wanted. The fortune teller asked my birthday (lunar) and the time I was born. I had to ballpark on the time (morning?) and I may have completely made that up, so who know how much that screwed the pooch on my fortune. I don't really believe in the whole deal anyway, so I'm not too worried about it anyway, I just wanted to do it for the experience.

After she calculated my lunar birthday, she just ran through my life chronologically. She asked what I wanted to know about and I said my career, my student also threw in a bunch of questions about my personal life as well for good measure.

The gist of it is as follows... the next two years are going to be kind of crappy. Not super terrible, not bad enough for her to write me an amulet, but not good. In two years I will marry a man that is tall and most likely foreign, maybe Chinese. He will be very successful in business or maybe in the government. It won't be anyone I know now. We will have two children, a boy and a girl. 

In two years I will also experience a turning point (one could infer that this will be the whole marriage thing but who knows). After that, life will be great, I'll have a career in technology and will be very successful. Nothing too crazy or notable throughout, just an overall good life. If I stay out of the US it will be even better.

I asked about my parents and my brother and had to give their birthdays as well. Got some good and bad details there. Nothing crazy surprising.

My student also had her fortune told. The most I caught there was that she will have a child (a boy) at 43. She is currently in her late 30's and already has an eight year old daughter.

The whole time we were there, other people were in the room. A woman that I'm assuming was the fortune teller's daughter was in the room and then another woman that must have been her next appointment joined as well. I asked my student about the lack of privacy on the way out, and she said that the Chinese think that since they don't know the other people they don't care what people hear about them.

The whole thing was pretty cheap, only 30 yuan. The cost depends on what you ask and what they do; it can be upwards of 150 yuan. I might go again to another fortune teller that reads tea leaves or coins, we'll see. Overall the whole thing wasn't very impressive.

Chinese honesty

Last week, one of my Oil 2 students told me he met a Chinese friend of mine taking a test earlier that day. He said the guy knew the other foreigners as well and it sounded like we were quite good friends. The options of people this could have been were pretty slim, so I figured out who it was very quickly, and was immediately confused as to why this person was taking a test.

My student took it to advance in his job. My friend is technically unemployed, but sometimes does work for his parent's business. He has a masters degree from the UK, is not currently looking for a job and lives at home. I could not for the life of me figure out how the test would benefit him. I expressed as much to my student, and he said they were kind of cheating. He and my friend were put into a secret room to take the test and left alone with their answer sheets. Someone returned later to collect the answers.

This still didn't explain to me why my friend would need to take this test to cheat on anyway. And my student is quite smart so I didn't see him needing to cheat from my friend either. When I asked my friend, he didn't want to tell me or explain at all and said that he wasn't proud of it (so naturally I had to out him on my blog, sorry!).

Apparently, someone with some kind of government connections had paid him to take the test for them. Everyone that takes this test has a picture attached to their registration form. Whomever paid my friend to take the test knew someone that could usher my friend into a private office to take it instead of in the large room with the list/photo check in.

If he was so ashamed, I wasn't sure why he did it to begin with, but I only pushed for so many details.

Today, I returned to school after a break to have the receptionist immediately tell me to talk to a Chinese girl standing at the counter. She didn't tell me what to talk about and seemed quite frantic, but I had a class to prepare for. I asked the girl a few questions and gathered that she was a junior in high school and tomorrow had an interview with a private language school that she wished to attend. I told her and the receptionist that I had to go but they would have to rearrange my afternoon a bit if they wanted to me to spend time preparing her for the interview.

The situation seemed a little weird, the girl wanting to practice the day before an interview and telling me no to "practice" but yes to "prepare" (I assumed practice was just a new word). Turns out they wanted me to get the girl's life story down this afternoon so I could just pretend to be her and do the interview myself tomorrow. I have no clue if it was her idea or my school's.

By the time I figured this out, the girl was gone, but I told school admin it was a terrible idea and I wouldn't do it. They found a Chinese teacher to do it instead.

change of plans

So, a few weeks ago, School #1 tried to mess with my life once again. My recruiter emailed me to say that my position had AGAIN been given away somehow. She said the school wanted to offer me a different position at a sister school in a neighboring city with a nearly identical contract. Knowing all I know now, I know I can probably make more money elsewhere and not get dicked around nearly as much.

I'm also finding that I really like much of the flexibility of a private school (School #1 is a public school, so I lose 90% of that) and also the way my teaching is going right now, both the students I teach and the structure of my schedule.

I was initially looking at public schools in Korea when I first decided to teach abroad. There, hogwans (aka private schools) are more of a crapshoot as far as shadiness goes, and public school jobs tend to be much cushier. I assumed that logic applied to public and private schools in China as well, but talking to other foreign teachers here, the general consensus is that private are better.

My contract with my private school has a set salary for up to 88 teaching hours per month. Anything beyond that, I get paid overtime for and it's completely at my discretion whether I get near that or not. Office hours (for lesson planning and such) don't count towards teaching hours, but since my return to Songyuan I have stopped lesson planning, I no longer need to. This setup is pretty standard.

My contract also says I get one day off per week, public holidays off, and an allotment of personal paid vacation days. Since arriving, I've worked a zillion days in a row, including holidays, and banked all my days off to take long holidays. It's working out to a vacation a month, and every other month is a loooong vacation. I actually really love this because it gives me a lot more freedom to go do things I want, when I want. It's a give and take.

My classes in Songyuan are shaping up to be mostly tutoring hours. I tutor a high school boy that will go abroad to finish high school and then attend university in Canada; he will leave in about a month and has absolutely no interest in focusing, studying or putting any effort into learning English. My only job with him is to get him talking for two hours a day. I have an amazing amount of conversations about high school girls every week, lol. He's going to take me boxing on Saturday though, so there's definitely some perks to teaching him.

I am also tutoring a high school girl that is planning to attend college in the UK. First she must attend a language school there for a year to help catch her up. She is quite the opposite of the boy, she is very focused and tries really hard. Vocabulary is her biggest challenge. I use a book for the basic structure of our daily lessons and then tie in whatever practical life things come up.

Both of them spend almost all day every at our school studying and do not attend their Chinese high schools at all, ever. They actually took a field trip back to their high school yesterday and were somehow allowed to just join their former classmates in what they call PE, but seems to be the equivalent of recess. Somehow I'm thinking security and school shootings are not an issue here...

In addition to them, I tutor a man that is the administrative assistant of a president in one of the oil companies here, an oil company translator that has worked primarily with written language and then teach my old favorite class, Oil Adults 2. I'm pretty happy with everyone I teach.

Thinking about these things and then what School #1 was offering me, I told them I was no longer interested in either contract, and I parted ways with my recruiter as well. As much as it makes me a little nervous not having a job or apartment lined up for September, I know this is definitely the better way to go.

I've just been looking at a map of China, figuring out where I want to be and then trying to find jobs there. I will probably take a holiday in May to visit a few cities I am interested in and just drop in on schools there and see how it goes. People tend to not plan so far in advance in China, and espeically since I am already here, it will be fine.

a day in the life: TEDA

Life in TEDA has been busy so far. I got in late yesterday afternoon, had two tutoring sessions with children yesterday evening, with minimal time to lesson plan, a demo class to a corporation this afternoon, a sort of meet and greet with an adult I'll be tutoring this afternoon and then my two tutoring children this evening. I'm not teaching all that many hours per week here, but I am teaching every day. That in itself I'd be ok with (accumulated time off is great), but my teaching hours are all spread out throughout the day. I have adults midday pretty much every day and children every evening, so I really can't go anywhere or do anything. Saturdays are my only option for exploration because I don't have anything until 5pm. We'll see how long this takes to drive me crazy...

I was thinking about a field trip to Tienanmen Square this Saturday morning and I asked my TA if she wanted to come but she declined. And discouraged me from going as well. Apparently it will be crazy on a Saturday and there's not that much to see anyway. She said she'd be up for a different adventure though, so I am now in search of anything else to do in the near vicinity. There's an art museum we passed yesterday that I want to check out, but I don't think we need an entire day for that. TEDA does have some fun and random public art that I saw today though.

The whole TA thing is kind of interesting for me. She was initially presented to me as a teaching assistant. When I got here she seemed to be more of a personal assistant to my school owner and now sometimes to me. She opens my car doors and shuts them for me and things like that. It's kind of strange, like she's almost trying to take care of me. We had some dirty dishes in the sink from our dinner last night that I washed today and she was so surprised at a foreigner washing dishes that she took a picture. What on earth have other foreigners been like?! She's fun though, and teaching me Chinese and we seem to have a lot in common, which makes for a good roommate situation.

My students here seem ok as well. I have a boy that is in middle school and absolutely amazing. His English is phenomenal. Better than my TA's or my school owner's. He cracks me up, when I was first asking him what he's interested in he tells me politics and history. Unfortunately I am interested in neither of those things, soooo on a compromise we are reading Anne Frank. I also have a middle school aged girl whose English is quite good, but not on the same level as the boy's. She has traveled all over the world and I am definitely jealous.

As far as the adults go, my demo class today was to an international software company. I ended up there through a contract with the government. The company saw my resume and decided I was too young though, so this demo class was my make or break, no word yet on how that went. They gave me no direction or level of my audience ahead of time, so I taught a class on marketing. Turns out I was teaching a bunch of managers in a technology department. They had no concept of marketing and were not participatory at all, quite different from my business English class in Songyuan.

Outside of them (if they decide to keep me), I have the middle school boy's father, who is actually very high up in the labor union here. He seems nice enough, but he has a very low level of English right now. Very different from anyone I have taught so far. Apparently I made a very good impression on his son yesterday, because he brought me a gift, a China tea set, this afternoon.

So I spent my Valentine's Day with a bunch of students, my TA and my boss. This morning my TA goes, "Happy Valentine's Day. I got you a present. It's breakfast." Made me laugh. We cracked up over our Valentine's dinner too; our school owner and another caretaker type guy that works for him made us dinner because they both cook and we don't. Nothing wrong with men cooking for two women on Valentine's Day!

apartments, hot pot & restaurants

…and I have arrived in TEDA (Tianjin Economic Development Area), woot! My apartment here is significant nicer than The Crack Den and very large. I share with my Chinese TA, which I am completely fine with; we each have our own bedroom and bathroom and all that. She got here first though so she has the master suite, which kind of sucks, but whatever. That' s basically me bitching just to bitch at this point. It's still much much better than any apartment I saw in Songyuan. We have Western style bathrooms, a Western washing machine and Western stove, microwave and toaster oven (as opposed to a hot plate only in the kitchen) too. Pictures to come later.

It's also been confirmed that I still have new digs in Songyuan, regardless of where I am right now. My boss there came up to me yesterday, not knowing that I was planning on moving my stuff to the Indonesian Canadian's apartment until I returned, and said I should pack everything up so that when the Chinese American grad student leaves at the end of this week, she can have my things moved into his apartment to essentially claim it as mine. I asked a couple of the foreigners if they thought that was safe and the general consensus was that that should be ok, so hopefully I return to find everything there and intact!

After class yesterday I went home and finished the unpacking and repacking and then a Chinese friend of mine took me out for hot pot for my last meal in Songyuan. Hot pot is kind of fun, there is a hotplate in the middle of the table where they keep a pot of boiling water with whatever level of spice you like. You order meats and vegetables and such and put them in the water to cook them right on the table. There is also a crazy sauce bar where you mix your own sauces for your food. There honestly had to have been at least 20 options of sauces and things to mix in and people put a lot of different things into each sauce; I ended up with something very peanut-ey and something pretty spicy. I think I did pretty well for not being able to read what I was mixing and not wanting to be obviously sniffing every option. People stare enough as it is !

I have yet to cook in China (shocker), so I have been to a lot of different restaurants. Most of them have been the restaurant equivalent of dive bars, really cheap, not super clean looking but really good food. My business English class told me yesterday that China has a huge problem with food safety which was slightly unsettling, but I haven't gotten sick yet so I'm not too worried. The fast food chains here are more expensive than the divey places, and the Chinese idea of fast food is comparable to a Chiptole or Panera, as opposed to a McDonald's or Burger King. I've also been to a few pretty nice places (like the hot pot place), which in general have had significantly better ambiance but not necessarily significantly better food. Not enough to justify the expense.

It kind of makes me laugh a little when people ask me what I feel like in terms of food here. Whether we get dumplings or noodles or hot pot, it's all Asian food, so it all has similar flavors and makes no difference to me. So far, for the most part I've just been letting people order whatever they think is good for me. Most all meals here are family style, which I love since I always want to share and try everything. I'm still getting used to the over ordering though. The Chinese always order way more food than they need, part of it is to show that they can and part of it is to show respect for their company. Coming from a family where you had to finish everything on your plate in order to get up from the dinner table, this can get a little overwhelming! But they never expect or want to finish everything. They rarely take the extra food home though, which I need to get into the habit of doing (see above regarding not cooking!).

Beijing, Li Mei & firing people

SO much to blog about tonight, but I am so tired... we'll see how far I get. I am in Beijing for the night on my way to Tianjin. I drove two hours from Songyuan to the Changchun airport and got there about an hour before my flight tonight, so I had a lot of time to actually make notes about things I'd been meaning to post about, now I have a whole list!

I'm glad to be staying in Beijing, the original plan was to head to Tianjin straight away after I got in, but luckily the guys that picked me up were tired too, so we're staying the night here. I wish I had time to explore the city, but it's very late and I'm very tired, so that's out unfortunately. Back on the plus side, my hotel is more on the Western side, so I'm pretty excited about the bathroom (Western toilet, stall shower with what looks to be an awesome showerhead!).

Today I had 4 hours of my business English class with the same group from Friday and Saturday. They came to class with my Chinese name today: 李美 (Li Mei). According to them it means "beautiful," "American" and "Liz." What they don't know is that it also is the name of the Mortal Kombat character below, lol, which I am definitely ok with.

When the term "ladies man" came up yesterday in conjunction with Fabio's namesake, a bit of a joke started about another man in the class, David, being a ladies man as well (both are actually happily married). They asked me to rename David, so now I have a Fabio and a Romeo in that class; I love it!

Today we covered writing business communications and I had the students do an exercise that involved them writing a letter terminating an employee. These were very interesting to read/hear; everyone was way too nice in their letters. They had a really hard time saying "you're fired" or explaining why without contradicting themselves and later saying the employee had done a good job, because they didn't want to hurt the employee's feelings and they were too concerned with the Chinese idea of being polite. It makes me curious as to how that goes in real life situations here, does anyone ever get fired?

business, dinner, Fabio & names

I taught my level 2 business English adult class today... for four hours. Sounds crazy and intimidating, but actually they're a fun group and time flies with them. They have a huge range in where they are at with the English language, so that can be tricky, but they understand that so it's all good. A group of them took me out to dinner after class; the more advanced students like to practice their English and have natural conversations. We had a great time! I think they liked the fact that I wanted a picture with them :)

Chinese people make up their own English names and change them whenever they feel like it. They all have a story for why they have their name, which can be pretty interesting. One of my students' names is Fabio, it always cracks me up. I asked today why he's called that and apparently a teacher named him that. This led to me explaining the term "ladies man" to my students and then showing them pictures of the real Fabio... which led to Fabio asking me for a new name, ha.

The group that took me to dinner is making up a name for me for class tomorrow, stay posted to see what they come up with...

and so it begins

When I came here, I thought I was going to prefer teaching very young learners. I told my school as much, but I asked to teach a bit of every age group and English level just to get the experience, and see if maybe something else turned out to be a better fit. This is the beauty of private schools, and mine in particular, the opportunity for flexibility and catering my classes towards what I want.

I had my first "class" yesterday, I tutored a high school senior for two hours. She is applying to universities at the end of this school year and would like to study English there, so she is coming to my school for additional study above and beyond her public school English classes. Since I am tutoring her, not working through a class with a book, I come up with all of the materials and focus on whatever she needs to get in to the university. I have her working with Judy Blume's "Are you there God? It's Me Margaret," which makes me probably happier than it should. We also worked through a news piece about July's haboobs. It's the little things!

I really enjoyed working with her though. She was very shy at first, but once she got more comfortable a lot of working with her is really just conversational. She is a very quick learner and tutoring her flows very easily. Maybe I will end up preferring this age...

My full class schedule for next week included all ages and levels of English, including my five hours this weekend with a group of business English learners from a local oil company (oil is the main industry in Songyuan). BUUUUUUT I have a big change coming. I will keep my working hours through this weekend here in Songyuan (another tutoring session, a level 2 Oral class and then my business English classes) and then Sunday night I will fly to Tianjin to teacher there. More on that to come!!!

downtime, design, cold & The Crack Den

You can tell how busy I am in any given day by how much I'm posting on here. Three post day today- I had a lot of downtime. I got to work early and then finished my lesson planning for my demo classes very early and had nothing to do. Then after my demo classes one of my bosses blew off my orientation... again. This could get interesting.

Had a long chat with our owner today and he's definitely going to have me doing graphic design as well as teaching; I get to design a business system, uniforms, etc. and he's going to buy me the software and pay me extra instead of taking away from my teaching hours. After our chat he also switched my class focus to mostly business English because of my background. Songyuan is primarily an oil town, so there is a lot of money here and many of our contracts are with the oil companies; my schedule actually says "Oil Adults 1" and "Oil Adults 2".

I'd love be outside exploring the city in my downtime but it is freaking cold! Today was a high of around 25 degrees Fahrenheit... which is warm. The next few days the high is between 16 and 9. This week Monday through Thursday I'm only working from 1:30pm-2:30pm so I'm going to have to figure out SOMETHING to do to amuse myself. Luckily two of the other English teachers got in today so I have more people to play with!

Being busy here makes me much happier. Someone asked me to go to lunch today and we had a girls' staff dinner tonight; having plans made my day. Well, that and the news that I'm moving out of The Crack Den in two days tops, woot!

Note to self: REMEMBER TOILET PAPER. I switched bags today and forgot to transfer the tp... huge tactical error.

Note to self: Traffic here WILL hit you; drivers do not give a crap about pedestrians. Or lanes and right/wrong sides of the road. Or speed limits. Or traffic laws in general.