July 10, 2009
I’ve been here, in
These past two weeks we have been teaching in the evenings at a nearby church. This is what our evenings have looked like. We started at 7:00 pm by singing for a half hour. We sang 3 songs—focusing on teaching one song while the other two songs are easy songs to pick up. At 7:30 pm we would split up into our classes and teach for 45 minutes. We were split into 5 classes—two teachers per class. We did our best to split groups up into different levels of English ability. Some of the classes were so large that the class would split in half, so that one teacher would each take half the class. Karin (my partner) and I had a class that would have been big enough to split up one day. We didn’t really talk about splitting up until after that class. However our class had been getting smaller every day since then, so we did not split up. It has been fun to see the personalities of our students come out as the two weeks progressed.
As I mentioned on my last post, we didn’t have anything planned for the mornings—or rather, everything we planned on for our mornings fell through. We did have one option left, which was teaching at a bilingual preschool (Chinese and English) for the mornings. We asked if they still wanted us to come (due to having previously turned them down), and they readily accepted us to come. They asked that we start coming Wednesday, July 1. That way the rest of the team would have been here for almost a week before we started (a government qualification for any foreigner coming into the country due to H1N1). We were ready to leave Wednesday morning when we get a call from our driver—he was here, but we couldn’t find him anywhere. He ended up going to the wrong hotel…an hour and a half later he finally arrived at our hotel. We still decided to go to the preschool—but we didn’t teach. We went to tour their facilities, learn about their school, and pick our classes. They have 5 classes—2-3 yr olds, 3-4 yr olds, (2) 4-5 yr olds, and 5-6 yr olds. We split up into our teaching partners from our evening classes and worked with them at the preschool as well. Karin and I taught one of the 4-5 yr old classes. The class had 25 students, but I don’t think we ever had more than 15 students there when we were there. I don’t really know why that is, but it was kind of nice. Apparently we had the worst class because of our students, and it was a little difficult especially the first few days, but it got better as the kids got used to us. Yesterday was our last day at the preschool. We were only at the preschool teaching for 5 days. We decided to only go 3 days on the last week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) because it is a long bus ride (anywhere from 45 to 75 mins one way, depending on the traffic and which route we took). We would spend about two hours with the kids, mostly playing with them. We would play games with them outside, sing songs with them inside, take attendance, talk about what day it is, what the weather is for the day, and do some crafts with them. It was fun and a good experience for us.
Saturday morning, July 11, we will be leaving our hotel that we have been living in for the past 2 weeks and four of us (Sarah, Bettina, Lorraine, and myself) will head to the airport while the Beijing team heads to a nice hotel for their last night in Beijing. We will be heading to WeiHai, flying out at 12:15 Saturday afternoon, where we will be for the next 4 weeks.
