teaching

teaching

I was very nervous about starting my classes, but luckily I was broken in to it well with lots of co-teaching, Sharing the lessons with an experienced teacher so they could jump in and save me if it all stated going terribly wrong, thankfully this has not happened, and I won’t say yet because I’m on my own now and if it goes wrong there’s no-one there to save me. But all the classes have been going well, some not so well, but generally pretty good. It can be a great feeling when you finish a class and feel that you’ve done a good job. After about three weeks of me being in the class observing, co-teaching and teaching the three year olds have started to warm to me, with only one girl bursting in to tears in today’s class, a massive improvement on last week!

I also had the joy of teaching a new class of 4 and 5 year olds in the classroom with glass walls, which all the parents took no hesitation in surrounding. Nerve racking for me but luckily the class went very well and it was a joy to teach. The only problem was the room was particularly warm, the school is moving to a new location soon so they decided to move the air conditioners first, which unfortunately coincided with the weather getting hot, and this was made even worse by being in what is basically a green house with no windows running and jumping around with a load of kids. I came out quite wet, and shaking, but it was still the best class I’ve had.

There is a massive variation in the classrooms, we teach kids up to about fifteen and then there are one on one classes with adults too. Some of the classes are small, and some are large, some noisy, some quiet, and despite what people seem to think about well disciplined obedient Chinese kids some of them are little shits. But there is a consolation, in China there is no problem with touching kids in class so picking up their book and whacking them one over the head doesn’t result in loss of career or addition to a certain register. But mostly the kids are great, very well behaved and hard working, especially considering that this is a private school and when they attend they have already spent a whole day in school or are on their weekend.