Happy One Month Anniversary To Me!

I’m celebrating my month anniversary in China! It feels like it’s been about 5 months, but I think the hardest part is behind me. The weather has cooled down from the 90’s with 80% humidity to the 70’s with about the same humidity. It’s lovely and makes teaching all morning in a non-air conditioned classroom much more bearable. I notice that a lot of my clothes have lost their elasticity and feel very stretched out. I think it’s partly from the hot weather, and partly from the air drying. I have a little wash machine in my apartment that works great, and then I hang dry as there are few dryer in China. It takes a bit more time, and clothes end up more wrinkly and stretched out, but all in all it’s not too bad. I feel more and more at home in my apartment every day. I’ve rearranged the furniture to make it seem more spacious, and bleached it top to bottom. I now feel more comfortable and less lonely spending time by myself here. I have a little gas stove in my place, but have yet to use it. I eat something small for breakfast, lunch at the school, and they make dinner for all the foreign teachers. It is such a huge money saver, and the food is pretty good! I’ve begun to have my first American food cravings though, and those are hard to suppress! There’s a restaurant in Wuhan that’s owned by an American couple that’s famous amongst foreign teachers for having amazing western food, so I’m planning to go there at some point after pay day to get my fix of something other than rice, meat and cabbage. I’m getting better at being able to go places solo. There are a lot of places near the school that I can just walk to, and for places that are far away I take a cab. I keep a little notebook full of addresses written in Chinese (translated by one of my co-teachers usually) and business cards. If I’m having a hard time pronouncing the name of the place I need to go, I just show them the address they usually have no problem getting there. It’s funny how whenever I go somewhere new my priority is to get a business card if I ever wish to go there again…something I never even thought about in my former life. My next task is to learn the bus system, as it is much cheaper, but that will come with time.

There are still days when I don’t really want to be in China. I want to be back in the comfort of my own home with every convenience that that life offers. But I really believe that this is making me a stronger person. After being here and facing these challenges for a year, I can’t imagine anything else seeming quite as difficult. Not to say that life here is "hard" or that living here is a daily struggle, but there are just so many added layers of difficulty and frustration and loneliness when you’re living somewhere foreign where you don’t know the language, understand the culture, or are familiar with your surroundings.

Fun Fact: Chinese people don’t take many pain-killers for everyday aches and pains like we do in the west. They use tea as their medicine, and boy is there an abundance of it here!

Trial and Error

The other day my co-teacher didn’t show up to my rowdiest 1^st grade class, leaving me alone with 45 1^st graders who can’t understand a word I’m saying, or I them. It was complete mayhem. Kids were running around, fighting, screaming, cutting their hair, spitting water everywhere….I wanted to cry. I did my best to control them, but it was not working. Finally I had to ask their homeroom teacher to come in, and then of course they sat there like little angels. Normally, the co-teachers are in charge of discipline in the classrooms. At first, I felt like my co-teachers were very overly strict….making the kids sit up perfectly strait, hands folded on the desk and looking strait ahead. But now, I see a direct correlation between the strictness of the teacher and how much those classes are learning. It’s that rowdy 1^st grade class with the non-strict co-teacher that I don’t feel is learning anything. I’ve really had to step up and be the disciplinarian, which is very unnatural for me, but I’m getting better at it. It’s pretty well known by all the foreign teachers that this is a job you learn by trial and error. You don’t get told much of how or what to do, unless you ask. I was told on Thursday of last week that I was supposed to have a test written for Friday. One day I was given a stack of 90 work books to correct, the next day I was told I did it all wrong. I’m usually told that my lessons are too difficult, too easy, too fast, too slow, etc. I just try to take everything with a grain of salt, and I really feel like I’m beginning to catch on and do things the way they want them done. I’ve learned to ask A LOT of questions. And I’ve noticed that my co-teachers appreciate this, because they can see that I’m trying very hard to do a good job. All in all, the school treats us very well though. They cook us dinner every evening, give us traveling allowance, give us fruit, milk, and other items on occasion, and give us a ton of paid holidays!

As far as my Chinese goes, I’m learning slowly. The pronunciation is by far the hardest of any language I’ve ever learned. I’m supposed to begin Chinese lessons at a local learning center here shortly, but until then I’ve just been studying solo and my co-teachers are great when I have questions. I don’t think I’ll ever get over how intense the Chinese language is though, especially the written language. Even my 4^th graders don’t know all the characters. The whole thing just amazes me, and I’m excited to learn more of the conversational language.

Fun fact: Many babies in China don’t wear diapers; they wear bear-bottomed pants. It’s a form of potty training where the babies learn to go to the bathroom on cue from a whistle from their mothers. It sounds bazaar, but apparently it works!

First Week of School

I arrived at my first class on Tuesday morning with no training, no experience and no lesson plan. Suffice it to say, I was very nervous! The first day was spent introducing myself to my students, telling them about myself, and attempting to learn their names…all 180 or so of them. I’m teaching first and fourth grade! I love them, especially because they are so different and at such different levels with their English. I have the best schedule I could ever ask for. I teach 4 classes a day, each 40 minutes. Most days I’m done by 12:30. I have a co-teacher in each class who is Chinese and speaks English. I feel very blessed by the co-teachers who were assigned to me- not only are they great to teach with but are so helpful if I have a question about the Chinese language and things like that. My first week of teaching was somewhat stressful- I’m such a type A personality that to make up fun and creative lesson plans from a somewhat vaguely structured workbook is overwhelming to me. But by the end of the week I really felt like I was getting the hang of it and the students were catching on. On Thursday some of my first graders came up to me in the hall and said "hello I’m Candy, what’s your name?" I was so proud because I taught them that!

First grade is fun because they are so darn cute and go ballistic when they see me. Definitely a confidence booster J My first day of teaching I had to give English names to the ones who didn’t already have them, about half in each class. I named them after my close friends and family members- so it’s safe to say that some of you have a child named after you in China! The lessons are very slow and repetitive- they have been taught to repeat everything as a way of remembering. The challenge for me with this grade has been to get them to stop repeating everything I say (and I do mean EVERYTHING) and make sure they actually understand what they’re saying. Right now we’re learning the ABC’s, and they’re doing so well! Fourth grade is great because their English is a lot more advanced and I can get a lot more across without having to use my co-teacher to translate. Right now we are practicing past tense, and learning about countries around the world! I love seeing their faces light up when the new words and ideas start to click with them.

Fun fact: Siestas are not just a Latino thing; it’s a Chinese thing too! All the teachers at the school set up cots in their office at lunchtime and take a snooze.

First week in China: Culture shock!

When I hit the one week mark, I knew I could do it. There were times though, in this past week that I have felt like hopping on a plane and getting the heck out of here. It’s hard to explain the loneliness and helplessness you feel when you first arrive in a foreign place. It’s like your world is flipped upside down and you don’t feel comfortable anywhere. But when I reached my one-week mark, I really felt like I had crossed a huge hurdle. But let’s start from the beginning:

I arrived in Wuhan on Monday night after a 22 hour trip. I was picked up from the airport by a Chinese English teacher and the school’s driver. The drive to the school was over ½ hour, and they made a point to drive through all the dingy parts of the city to give me a clear picture of my new home. Every time we drove by an old sketchy apartment complex, I cringed and prayed it wasn’t mine. They drove me to my apartment, which is inside the school and in a gated community, and dropped me off without saying much. My apartment is about the size of my Biola dorm room…tiny. It’s got a little kitchen and bathroom, and there was some food and toiletries here for me. At first I didn’t quite know what to do in a place this small, but once I got unpacked and moved in it began feeling like home. It’s in a 4 story complex full of foreign English teachers. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since I’ve been here, it’s that they give you minimal information, you pretty much have to figure everything out on your own. I started knocking around on doors the next morning to meet the foreign teachers. Some of them are new like me and some of them are returnees. They are very nice and have been so helpful in giving me the low-down of how this whole thing works. They’re all around my age, and are from Australia, England, Canada and the U.S. Most of my first week was spent learning the essentials: where to eat, how to get places, and fixing things that are broken in my apartment (it’s quaint but old). One of the most frustrating things about being here has been having my independence stripped: going anywhere by cab requires being able to pronounce where I want to go and how to get back- not an easy task just yet. As for the food- it’s amazing! Wuhan food is spicy (something my week Oregon tongue is still getting used to) but full of flavor! I think the best food I’ve had since I’ve been here is the "street food" or "alley food". I’m learning how to say my favorite foods, so even when I can’t read the menu (95% of the time) I can still order. Wuhan is a city of 9 million people- aka about the size of New York City. It’s the largest city in central China, and everything in it is large!

Fun fact: Chinese people LOVE Obama! I’ve had people who can barely speak English ask me where I’m from, and when I say America they instantly say "Obama!"