China: Life is Ticking Along

Photos...
1. Nice to see lots of hands up!
2. Teaching with the help of some Big Ben posters I nabbed from a
visit to Parliament before coming.
3. Zoe eating mutton kebabs with some students who took us to stay at their hometown.
4. 83million year old Swallow's Cave in Jianshui.

First of all – APOLOGIES! I haven't updated in a long time... China life has been flying by and our internet is painfully slow… so that's my excuse :) Anyway, on with the blog!

The past few weeks have been a flurry of fun and I've found a really  good routine. Every week we teach 12 classes and run English corner  during lunchtime (including weekends if I'm in school). English corner has become really fun over the past few weeks as we always have the same regular faces who pop in and occasionally see some new faces who see the craziness of English corner! The students have such busy lives and work so hard so I try my best to make English corner fun and beneficial for those who come. English corner is scheduled at the one time students can either take a nap or do homework and those who come have chosen to practice their spoken in English and get to know their new foreign teachers instead of enjoying
their one break! So I try to make the most of the privilege they've given me.
 
During the weekends we've stayed in school during some chilly 4degree weather, gone on a backpacker trip via a 6 hour bus journey to 83million year old caves which Swallows now nest in (incredible!) and been invited back to a student's hometown to stay with her family and friends for the weekend. People are incredibly friendly and so many of our students have gone out of their way to make us feel welcome. We've been invited by so many of them to visit their hometowns (incredibly sweet considering most of them only get to go home once a month if they're lucky) and when we swap mobile numbers they always say to call them if I have any problems and to hand the phone over so they can translate or to check if I'm paying the real, local price!

During evenings, we don't have classes but students have lessons again until 9ish, but some days the older students have "English practice" and we get multiple knocks at our door from students bored of listening activities until 11pm(!) since this is when they usually finish school. At first this was a bit difficult/surprising as western privacy is a foreign concept to most of the rest of the world, but Fiji trained me well for this and I'm not one to reject new friends and students willing to improve their English… so we have lots of Chinese friends now! We now exercise an open door policy and I've told all my students that they can come and visit whenever if they want to chat and it's great that they're so friendly.

Still loving teaching and its great that students are more familiar with how I teach and I'm more familiar with how they learn. They're much less shy and are now willing to speak up and I know how noisy each class can be...! Learning a foreign language, in a foreign language is incredibly daunting for each class at first, but after these few weeks it's much easier to teach since they're used to my accent/vocabulary and I know how difficult I can grade my language for each class. Very happy to be teaching such fantastic students!