SNOW! (and some more about my school)

November 5, 2012- It occurred to me that you may be curious about my school and my job as an English teacher here.  My school is called Baoding Eastern Bilingual School.  There is a primary school, a middle school and an international program. 

I teach grades 1,2,3, 5 and the international students.  I have each class once a week, and there are 6 classes in each grade.  With 50 students per class, this means I have around 1000 students in total. Unfortunately, I don't know any of my students' names yet.  On the first day, I was trying really hard to ask every student their name, but after a while one of the Chinese teachers told me that it would be impossible to learn all of their names and that I shouldn't try. 

My job is specifically to teach speaking and listening, which means that most of what I do is play games and sing songs with my students.  They have English class with their regular teachers as well, which I imagine are much more serious.  The students are usually very excited to see me since they know that my class is usually game based and also that I don't really know how to discipline anyone.  The younger students sometimes even cheer and jump up and down when I come to their class.  The same thing happens at the end of a game, when the winning team will cheer and the losing team will sit dejectedly with their heads in their hands. 

The international program at my school is made up of Mongolian, Korean and Kazakh students who are at our school to study Chinese.  They are offered English classes as well, but no one takes it very seriously.  Sometimes I only have two or three students in a class, sometimes I will have ten or more.  It all depends on who feels like learning English that day.  Most of these students are in their early 20's and some speak English very well already.  I usually just go and talk with them about American pop culture or ask them about their home country. 

This weekend it snowed in Baoding, and I couldn't figure out how to turn on the heat in my apartment for a really long time, since the remote was in Chinese.  Today I went to an old government building in Baoding with one of the other teachers at my school.  She grew up near Baoding, and we have become friends because we share some classes.  She teaches second grade English.  We talked a lot today about education in China and the US, and the pros and cons of each.  We also talked a lot about our families and future plans and literature.

My friend Ada and me outside the old government building in Baoding