Teaching

Both of us are now settled in to our roles as teachers and have finally figured out our teaching assignments. It took a while to get things sorted out for a multitude of reasons: from new students arriving in bunches weeks after the start of the semester, to the junior high not starting for a week after the high school; from teachers not being able to make it to the school for the first day of class because of visa issues, to students moving from one class to another because of their English level. In any case, we now know what classes we will be teaching for the rest of the semester, and can dig into prepping and planning for them.

Kristen is teaching four blocks of ESL classes on the girls high school campus (each block is 75min). Her girls are in grade nine, but because grade nine students in China spend the second half of the school year studying for exams rather then learning any new material, they have been sent to Maple Leaf to practice their English and get their fluency up in order to pass the entrance exams for the Maple Leaf high school. Kristen is teaching two classes of girls both Language Arts (reading and writing skills) and Communication Studies (oral and aural language). She is teaching those students with a higher level of English fluency among the new intake, and is working with several other teachers to prep and plan the course material (which builds off material made in previous years). 

Paul is teaching 6 blocks of Science for grade eights and 2 of ESL English for grade sevens (each block of which is only 45min long). He sees each block three times a week. Because the english level of these students is so low, he often has a Chinese assistant (who by the way has a masters from a Canadian university and has taught for several years... which makes Paul feel wholely underqualified!) work with him to explain some of the harder science vocabulary terms. He is working with this assistant (Xu Meng- Vicky) and another teacher (Petra- from Comox) to develop this new program, which is a pet project of the owner of the school. No pressure! He also teaches two classes of grade sevens an ESL English program with less structure, and a focus on writing. 

The students here are so much fun to work with. Sometimes they are tired (they work long hours and live in dormitories... who wouldn't be at least a little tired!) and  sometimes they are high energy, but the class management problems that you would see in a Canadian school are basically non-existent. In fact at the Junior High school, each class has a class leader. This is a student who has been appointed as the class manager: he or she will stand up and tell the class to calm down if they are getting too loud, will call out a student who is not trying hard enough, or will approach the teacher about students who are struggling. It takes a little while to wrap your head around for a teacher who isn't used to it, but so far, the system has worked really well!

The students seem pretty happy to have "Mr. B and Miss Rieu" (our noms de guerre as it were) as their teachers. Mr. B even recieved a tetra pack of milk from one of his students after he casually mentioned that his wife was having a difficult time finding milk that she liked!