Class Over!

My life as a teacher is nearing the end. Yesterday I had my final classes for the term. Today and tomorrow are the Dragon Boat Festival so it’s public holiday. Next week is Exam week, so I have 3 days of invigilating exams and then I just have to mark 43 papers.

This last 8 months have flown by and I’m starting to miss the place already. The last few weeks have been quite nice, as we move into Summer the campus looks quite beautiful.

We have one week here after the exams to say our goodbyes to students and teachers before we leave on the 11th June. We also want to do some of the sightseeing we didn’t get done in Beijing.

Getting back to a 9 to 5 job in October is going to be very strange, quite a change from working only 13 hours a week and having 5 months of holiday.

Back to the Blackboard

I got back from holiday on Friday, and this weekend has flown by. It would seem that 8am tomorrow I will be back in the classroom. I’m teaching the same subjects, but rather than two classes of Grammar and Writing and one of Reading and Vocabulary it’s now one of GW and two of RV. Also the class sizes are down to 15 in each class. This is very welcome news.

I’ll have 6 repeat students who I failed last term, and the rest will be all the students from the level below who have moved up. I bumped into a few of my old students this afternoon when I was picking up my text books. I’ll miss teaching them and hope the new guys are as much fun.

Class over for this term

On Friday we all finished our classes for the term. Next week is final exam week where the students will take their last exam of this term’s modules. If they pass the course they move up to the next level next term, if they fail they stay on the same level and repeat.

Most of my students will easily pass although some might not, and there are a couple who have done so badly that even with 100% in the final exam they can’t pass.

I’m teaching the same level next term so most of my current students wont be taught by me again. They seemed genuinely upset when I told them this which was quite flattering.

Friday night we went to Beijing to stay with friends and then last night most of the teachers came into Beijing and for an end of class celebration. We started out at The Den pub, and once we’d made the most of happy hour we moved on to the Swing Bar in SanLiTun bar street where we danced away to the live cover band until 4am. Quynh was a little drunk, so there was some propping up required at the end of the night, but we all got home ok at about 4:30am.

Tonight we’re just going to take it easy and watch some movies. Just need to get through the exams and do all my marking quickly, so we can head off on holiday on Thursday. Can’t wait.

One Teaching week left

As we get ready to celebrate the New Year we’re left with only one week of teaching left until the Final Exam week. Today I’ve been giving all my classes a pre-exam test which covers a number of the topics that will appear in the Final Exam.

I have one more test to go this afternoon and then it’s time to get the drinking shoes on and get ready to welcome in the New Year. We then have the next two days off to recover, leaving us with just one full week of teaching left. Having already covered everything that will be in the exam next week will all be revision so should be fairly easy.

Once the exams are over, I have 2 days to mark them, and then we’re outta here for 4 weeks holiday. I can’t wait. It’s getting far too cold here, and I miss my tan. Malaysia here we come!

Christmas and other celebrations

Well it all comes at once.

Firstly Merry Christmas to everyone (yes, I’m aware it’s the 27th already).

Christmas for us started the previous Friday when we finally finished negotiating contracts and signed on the dotted line. We’ll now be teaching here next term and we’re very pleased. Much drinking ensued. We continued the next day and threw in some KTV (Karaoke Bar) with lots of embarrassing singing and dancing.

We sobered up in time for the faculty Christmas dinner on Monday followed by the Student Christmas Party. Though it’s more of a show than a party. Quynh, Jemma (another teacher) and I performed a skit, we chose Monty Python’s Self Defence Against Fresh Fruit.

The rest of the show was made up of student performances of singing, dancing and comedy. All very good. We then headed off to the bar again.

We managed to avoid drinking on Tuesday, but we had to celebrate on Christmas Eve. It was the 1 year anniversary of the start of our travels. Since Christmas Eve 2007 we’ve been out of the UK for all but 16 days. We’ve travelled through Russia, Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Then we’ve spent the last 2.5 months teaching in China. Next, we’re going to visit Malaysia on our break between two terms.

On Christmas day we went into Beijing with 4 other teachers to have a Christmas Dinner. The Dinner itself wasn’t all that special but we had a good time anyway.

Along with all the celebrations, there has been a lot of work to get ready for the Final Exams just over 2 weeks away, so I’ve not had much time to do much work on the Wordpress Subdomain plugin. However, last night I got a few hours in and I’m pretty sure there will be a new version with some pretty important bug fixes out tomorrow. Most importantly it now works 100% with Wordpress 2.7 and Page subdomains work when you have a single tier permalink (e.g. /postname or /?p=123).

Anyway, gotta finish writing my Grammar & Writing Exam and then do some shopping.

Evaluations time

The Midterm Exams are over, marked and returned to the Students. Now it’s our turn to be examined.

Last week the students had to fill out questionnaires on us and this week we’ll have other teachers in our classes doing an evaluation on us. Once this is all done then we should find out at the end of the week if they want us to stay on and teach next term too. Hopefully they will and we can settle in for the next 7 months.

The students threw us a Thanksgiving Party on Thursday which was fairly new for me as being from the UK I don’t actually celebrate Thanksgiving. They gave some speeches, sang some songs, played some games and drank some beer. We were given a big piggy bank each and each student put a short message in it thanking us for teaching them. It was all very touching.

Student Photos

The exam week is over!

I’ve almost finished marking the papers but thought I’d post some photos of the students:

There are more on my gallery.

We also had a 11 legged race last weekend which I’ll post some photos of later.

Making Connections, Marking Tests and Writing Exams

This has been a fairly long week. Admittedly the piss up on Wednesday night to celebrate the election win for Obama didn’t really help matters.

I’m still really enjoying the teaching though am finding it hard to make a good connection with one of my classes. The other class I teach is great and we can have a laugh and a joke, but this class is just dead. Having never taught before I don’t have any well practised tricks up my sleeve to turn the situation around and without verbal feedback from the students it’s hard to know how well I’m doing as a teacher.

In a week or so’s time the University will be asking the students for feedback on us so they can decide whether to extend our contracts or not. I’ve got my fingerscrossed.

As for this weekend, I need to mark 28 reading and vocabulary test papers, 30 creative writing stories, write a pre-mid term test and the mid-term exam paper for grammar and writing. Thankfully next week should be fairly straight forward as after the tests I’ll be helping them revise for the mid-terms.

The Mid-term week, the week after next, means no classes so for the first 3 days we just need to invigilate a few exams, but the thursday and friday will be marking time. Hopefully by then we’ll know if we’ll be staying another term or not.

Settling in to teaching

We’re into our third full week of teaching now and getting into the swing of it.

The students are starting to open up more as they get used to us. I’m finding they’re more willing to put their hands up and ask questions, they also put more into their answers.

We’ve already enquired about extending our contracts to cover the second term. They want to wait until the midterm exams, just 3 weeks away, to see how we’ve managed so far. Hopefully all will go well and they’ll let us stay on.

As for my own personal development I think my confidence has improved imensely in the last 3 weeks. Being in IT I’ve never been the sort of person to stand up in front of a crowd and talk at length but I’ve been thrown into it here and it’s sink or swim. Previously the thought of standing in front of 30 people and talking for an hour to and hour and a half would give me nightmares, now I look forward to it everyday.

I went and bought a book to help me learn chinese last weekend and plan to start it this week. I’ve also been practising the words and phrases I already know. Hopefully with a bit of work I should leave china in 9 months time with a lot more self confidence and the ability to speak chinese.

As the Monty Python song goes – Wo ai zhongguo ren.

First Lessons

Well I’ve now done a total of 4 lessons. I’m teaching two different courses, Reading & Vocabulary and Grammar & Writing. The class level for these courses is 05 which is divided into two sets, 05A and 05B. The 05B set I have for both courses but 05A I have for just Grammar & Writing.

Most teachers have just one course but some of us have two courses which means double the work as you have to produce two lesson plans rather than one. That’s a bit of a pain in the arse but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

The first classes are easy, it’s all introduction. You stand there and give them some details about yourself and then get them to go around the class, each standing and giving some details about themselves. Then I ask if they have any questions for you, normally met with silence. So I just went down the list of names and got each one to stand up and ask me a question. They all had questions just their confidence to speak English with out being directly asked is quite low. Both classes asked if I liked Chinese girls and would I marry one. Easy to answer, yes and I did. They also asked if I had a Chinese name which I kinda have, telling them produced some laughter and they corrected me on my pronunciation. It’s Da Xióng Mao, Giant Panda.

Now we’re onto the proper teaching and a lot of time is spent lesson planning. As we get used to this and the kids it should take a lot less time. Those who are here for a year get a very easy second term as you teach the same level and same courses but to new kids. This means if you’ve kept all your class plans from the previous term you can just run through them all again. We’ve not decided if we’re doing the second term yet, depends how we get on and if the economy back in Britain improves at all.

Anyway, I should get back to planning my next lesson of Grammar & Writing (present tense, thrilling stuff).