Reflections After Two Weeks of Teaching

I'm two weeks into my first real job after graduating college, and I have to say...it's a pretty sweet gig. The hours are minimal, I only have to make two lesson plans a week, and the students are amazing. Overall, I'm more that satisfied, and glad of the opportunity to come here.

Of course, everything isn't all peaches and roses, and most of my frustrations so far have had to do with the administrative side of things. The network of administration in China is labyrinthine, with a huge number of people delegating tasks to other people, until no one really knows who is supposed to be doing what. To be fair, this is a very new college (founded in 2006), so it's only to be expected that they're still figuring things out. My first big surprise was when I found out that my News English course had a text book...after teaching two classes. And I only found out because a student was kind enough to let me know. Luckily, the first week I had already planned as an introduction/syllabus week, so it was no great loss. I picked up the textbook on Wednesday after class, and used it over the weekend to plan my next week's lesson...only to discover that the office had given me the student text book. This meant that in a text book comprised solely of listening exercises, I only had the CD for the 'take home' listening part, rendering about 4/5 of the book absolutely useless. I asked the office about it on Monday, but it seems they never saw any reason why I might need a teacher's text book in order to teach a course, and so had never ordered one. Sigh. They are hopefully in the process of rectifying this right now, but I'm planning to make next week's lesson sans textbook, just in case.

Other fun quirks: you can't access teaching rooms outside of the regular class time, so if you want to practice a lesson, or test your powerpoint before class, you are out of luck. Also, teachers have to pay for their own printing, which means that if I want to have a single handout for class, I have to print out over 125 copies and pay for them myself.

Lastly, we had an administrative meeting with the dean of the college, the heads of our departments, and other important people. It was incredibly informative, and gave us tons of information about how we should be structuring our class. The only problem is that this meeting was held two full weeks after class had started. Much of it was information about what we should be telling our students on the first day of class (grading, missing class, etc.), which is pretty difficult to do when the first class has already come and gone. Oh, China.

However, as I said at the beginning, despite these sometimes aggravating, sometimes bemusing peculiarities of teaching in China, I have been having a wonderful time so far. A highlight from earlier this week was Teacher's Day, in which all of the teachers are honored. Students will often give their teachers small gifts, and there was an AMAZING free lunch in the cafeteria, complete with a choice between red wine or Sprite. There was a ceremony for all of the teachers in the afternoon, with speeches by various important people, and all of the teachers received a bouquet of beautiful flowers and a salary bonus.

Seriously, what's not to like about this?

I thought it was a great tradition, and it was great to have a day to really appreciate teachers, who play such an important role in our society and yet largely go unrecognized for it. China can leave me frustrated and bewildered, and yet then I turn around to find something that fascinates and delights me.