International Relations

I finally have some real lessons to teach. It is perhaps not what I envisaged prior to coming to China but it should be a bit of a laugh. I will be teaching some Korean children, from the ages of 11-14, who have come to China following their parent's career. It was all very sudden; I came back from another trip to Nanyang (more on that later) and received a call from Mr Nyu while I was eating dinner. He said that he wanted me to come in to see him the next morning to discuss a schedule. On arrival at the school he promptly told me that I would be teaching Monday to Friday, 9 - 11. Then, this being China, I was informed that in ten minutes I would be taking a class of six Korean students from the ages of eight to eighteen to assess their level of English. Rather a big ask. This seems to reflect two attitudes that I have repeatedly encountered while teaching. Firstly that any warning is a gift, almost everything is announced on the day and last minute, which is extremely frustrating. Secondly, their is an assumption that as an Englishman, I will have innate teaching skills and knowledge of the many sylabbi available to teach foreign children English. Anyway, I took the class and with a little help from Selwyn (a black guy [so more of a lao wai than me] from Canada who is teaching some of the children and was told just as late as I was) I split them into beginner, intermediate and advanced levels.

I am interested to see how this will go, I will try to help the children as much as possible in the coming months and we will see how it pans out.

Anyway, I should probably briefly describe my second trip to Nanyang. This time it was just me and another teacher from Horizon. Thankfully she had a pretty good level of English so I was not so isolated as before. We visited three schools, including the one in Zhenpin where, yet again, the headteacher managed to sneak about two hours extra teaching on us. The three days were quite enjoyable, with yet more free food and drink. What I will take away from this trip is the fantastic voices I heard. Here are my top three in reverse order:
In third place is the female teacher who sounded like Simon of 'Alvin and the Chipmunks'. It took a lot of effort not to burst out in hysterics when she was repeating the word 'balloon' to her class.
In second place was a senior male teacher at one of the schools who had a perfectly normal voice when speaking Chinese but a ridiculously camp one when speaking English.
In a well deserved first place was the headmistress of the first school that I visited, who not only looked scary but sounded like a cross between the girl from 'The Exorcist' and Shao Fu (Voytek's pug). Her shouting at her staff was one of the most disturbing things I have ever witnessed.