Miss Kirby

So after reading the old blog entries I’ve had… that’s right, all two of them…I realized that I have told you nothing about my daily life here. Take it all with a grain of salt. I love Loudi, honestly. Reading this though, you’d think I didn’t.

Our first week here was spent just getting settled in. I officially started teaching on September 9th. Business English—because, let’s face it, I have extensive training in Business. So basically, the night before the first class I had to cram in a crash course on Business terms. Only to find that my students barely understood the terms anyway. The first couple times I taught, I felt like I was a terrible teacher. My students always looked confused or bored. Except when they were taking pictures of me with their phones.

Tony only had one class too. Both of our classes were at 8 am. A time I avoided in college… I assumed all of my students would be so tired that they wouldn’t care at all about the class. I didn’t realize that it’s just common for them to wake up at 5:30 or 6:00. Even on weekends. I should’ve realized this, though. Given that at 6 every morning, the loudspeakers come on and an array of fast-paced Chinese music blares out until around 7:30 to give the students some work-out music as they perform their daily mandatory exercises. I’ve learned numbers in Chinese pretty well from one song that repeats over and over again the equivalent of saying, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8!” and so on. And on. And on and on. The song is seriously about 4 minutes long. I am, of course, lying in bed with a pillow over my ears and the drapes closed to block out as much sound as possible. I get up grudgingly at 6:30 and take a shower… broken windows and all. On that note, it’s getting colder here. Which means no matter how hot my water is, my bathroom is still chilly.

So for the first month or so, we were fairly free… only one class a week. Broken into two parts… 8-8:45. Ten minute break. 9-9:45. Every Wednesday. After the first week, we were invited to dinner with our dean. Great! Because all we’ve been eating is an alternate schedule of rice and noodles. (We’ve gotten much better since then. We eat pretty good every night—spinach and green beans from Jingu Market down the street…fried noodles, bell peppers and chicken… oh we’re good.) We left that first dinner with 10 more lessons. Not mandatory, but offered in such a way that it would be rude and probably detrimental to refuse. We would now be teaching primary school children Wednesday through Saturday. We asked when we would start teaching and our new boss, Mrs. Xu, informed us that she would call us tomorrow to discuss it. At around 9:00 we both got a phone call. “We are on our way to pick you up for the school. Are you ready? We will meet you by the gate.” Being a day that I didn’t teach at the college, I was (clearly) still in bed. So, I jumped up, pulled on clothes and ran outside to greet them. The primary school classes are actually a great time, though. Every afternoon during the week, I walk down to my school and teach about 2 classes a day, 30 minutes each. Saturday I have 3. The children are so excited to learn and so pumped up about anything you do. Basically I’m known among them as the “American” or “Miss Kirby” and when I show up, you know a game is going to be played.

A week later, we were invited to another dinner. This time, we were suspicious. Dinner, eh? Don’t trust ya. And, of course, we accepted the invitation. And, of course, we left dinner with kindergarten classes every Thursday morning. Kindergarten in China basically means undisciplined, unruly, unmanageable children. The only discipline these kids get is a whop on the head with a book—sometimes hard. Corporal punishment in action. Sometimes you might hear a “A-TTTENNNTION!” and the kids will do a little march and yell “1, 2!” But the quiet is not lasting. Yes, yes, I know. They are kids. They are supposed to be crazy. Just consider, though, each Kindergarten class has 3 teachers. Plus the English teacher that comes every day to teach for an hour. Which now includes me. I now have 2 of these classes on Thursday. Tony got out of it because his schedule at the college got changed to where he teaches his Business English on Thursday around 10:00 am. So I got stuck with his class. Which really is upsetting because the day they pinned his class on me, I was actually trying to quit the lessons altogether. Oh well. I guess it’s additional pay so I can handle it. At least for a little longer. They are cute, but so tiring.

My classes got changed at the college too. Not to another day. Just additional. I now teach a group of freshmen Tourism English. Considerably easier to catch onto than Business English. My Tuesday 8 am class, and strangely it also meets every other Wednesday at 10:10. I am now up to 18 lessons a week. Tony’s got 12. Some days, we are both pretty tired. Not that the classes are hard or even too long. I think the exhaustion may come from trying so hard to be understood and to understand. Thankfully, though, this has eased considerably. My sophomore students are beginning to know my personality. They catch on when I am picking on them, and they have begun to tease me right back. One student actually told me recently that the class considers me to be a friend—that I am patient and enthusiastic with them, and they like that about me. It was a good feeling. My freshmen are getting there, although some days we just stare at each other. I begin to celebrate little victories. I gave them homework, which they didn’t do, so we read the passage they were supposed to memorize as a class. I then asked who wanted to come up and read it… and suddenly I had a rush of students coming to the front of the class to recite the passage! It was amazing!! Especially since the most common thing to hear when speaking to a Chinese student is, “My English is so poor.” And this is spoken at almost a whisper. READING IN FRONT OF A CLASS. And loudly!

Tony and I were tricked, yet again, into giving a lecture a week or so ago. We were under the impression that we were just going to be saying a few words in front of some freshmen. Turns out, this was advertised as OUR lecture. To be given to around 100 or so freshmen students. Luckily, we had been teaching long enough to know how to talk to them. And to just use some recycled lesson plans. We had them laughing and asking questions for about an hour and a half. And somehow my phone number has been cycled through the student body to where I get random texts written all in Chinese, or better yet…phone calls from a professor who perpetually sounds drunk. I am now seeing more and more of my classes filled with students who just have free time during my class periods and have decided to sit in. I’m pretty excited by it, even though I’ve been ignoring the phone calls.