Truth be told, I knew
this would happen. I knew it the moment I stepped into Haerbin and had little
but free time on my hands.
It seems to be a fact of
life as inescapable as taxes, but not quite the level of death. I know that
some people get away with tax evasion, but I’ve yet to hear anyone being put
away cheating death.
I arrived in China
during the school’s summer holiday which meant about 90% of the staff were out
on vacations somewhere across Asia, from the Chinese employees and owners to
the foreign teachers. Only a few people were left behind to help me settle in
Haerbin, though they were helpful. That meant no classes, few people to talk
to, and even less to do (it’s hard to go out places when you don’t know the
places to go out to or the language in which to ask what places are those
places worth going out to in the first place).
Nevertheless, I made
myself busy. I spent a most of my days trying to get over jetlag (which
requires a lot of strenuous sleeping or lying around watching TV), unfolding
the contents of my two boxes out into the apartment and trying to find the bare
minimum essentials I could survive on at various local stores or venders.
It was a very easy too
weeks with little on my table.
Then, a dump truck
backed up and buried my table in an avalanche of panic, schedules, and kindergartners.
The problems started
showing up when I began my “training.” Normally, this is done in a mock-class
with demonstrations, plenty of preparation on behalf of the trainer, and after
the new teacher had perhaps seen a class or two in action. My training was “Who
is left in town? Just send that dude.”
Local helper and all
around nice guy, Scott, did a fair job for not expecting he’d have to train me
but …
… To make matters worse
is I had no context to the training, having never seen a Chinese-English class.
It’s like showing someone how to drive via holding up two disembodied pedals
and a steering wheel. And the student having never seen a car or a road before.
To make matters worse
still, no administrative staff were around, so Scott had no idea what classes
to train me for. Is he teaching ABCs? Grammar for high level courses?
Conversational role play? It’s like training someone to drive while not knowing
if he’ll be a pilot, a trucker, or a ship captain. You get the basics of speed,
brakes, and steering, but that's the best you have.
To make matters even
worse yet, there was a foreign teacher staff shortage, and they needed to have a foreign teacher for half of every class due to the
expectations of the parents paying for the school. So, the moment everyone
returned from vacation, they manage to tell Scott my duties only the day before
I actually get ready to teach ... about 17 classes in a row. So the answer to
the question: am I teaching Grammar, ABCs, conversations, or what not? is D:
All of the above. On my first day. (Granted, the school did realize the
enormity of this and said to just get through this as best you can and get some
brownie points with the school).
To make matters … I
think I’m out of adverbs. To make matters evenner worsest still yet, that
creates a situation where I have to absorb a metric gigaton of information on
how to be a teacher in the details, while planning and preparing to execute 17
different lesson plans with only a half day to prepare and memorize each one.
So I was being thrown in
front of 20 or so students to perform, teach, and entertain them for 17
different occasions, on a wide range of subjects with only about a half a day
of actually training.
And their parents can
watch you via cameras in the lobby.
Good luck.
I knew this would
happen. It’s always like this in life. Either you have nothing to do, or have
to do everything. There are few times that feel in between and
even.
Putting yourself in my
shoes, I’m sure you can imagine a fraction of the tension I was under, to song
and dance so many times for all these different kids and try to take in as much
as possible. Come the end of that weekend, I was so worn out, my eyes were more
glazed than a donut, and my brain could have made a great jello providing you
had little purple food dye.
Even after all this, I
can say it went … well. It actually did. It was not without problems though
none really make amusing anecdotes. I’ll go into more of the day-to-day or
class-to-class teaching of it another time, but in a nutshell, I really like
kids, goofing off, and making people laugh, and my classes largely consist of
me harnessing these traits to engage kids in English.
It was long, it was
tiring, and it was very stressful to plan and wait between classes, not knowing
how they’d go that weekend. But after it was all over, I realized something: I
really love this job.
