Thursday, June 22, 2006



TEACHING

Have corrected my spelling in this post now, and have asked myself to see me after class....

Teaching itself would have been a bizarre and fundamentally different experience anyway, but throw Chinese inner city schools, every age between kindergarten and grade 6 in to the mix and you've got enough ingredients for me to create schooboy (or should that now be school teacher?) errors all week long!

I have to admit, that with no experience, a text book with material I could stretch to 2 minutes worth of teaching I was quite nervous at the thought of spending 43 minutes of my first 45 minute lesson in silence. Maybe I could take them through the exploits of my trip so far? Those that would understand would be appalled (if they got the non blog friendly version!) and the others would be just as confused as me trying to teach them English anyway!

Or maybe I could teach them some of my own particular gifts to the English language....things that you wouldn't find in an addition of Oxford, Collins or Webster's?

Thankfully, initial nerves were just that and my first 45 minutes went pretty well, therefore avoiding me warping a generation of Shanghai minds with stories of drunken debauchery and they kept a pure vocabulary.

So, if anyone visits Shanghai and the kids are all snapping their fingers (Ali G stylee) and talking about "nipping for a crafty beer", "getting some Wayne" or screaming "Gisel Griester!" at their mates then don't come looking for me.

Joining just before the end of the semester was a bit tough as I was taking over someone elses work, this meant that I couldn't ease the kids in with my subtle style of laid back inept teaching but had to pick up the reins from a no doubt experienced and qualified professional the kids probably loved!

This also meant that besides the usual "how old are you?" "where are you from?" type questions that get fired at me every 30 seconds and from any distance I was supposed to know what had happened to their other teacher, or more likely given my unsual (unqualified I mean!) approach to teaching it was more like a "what have you done with our old teacher!!??" type questions.

I've now been teaching for just over 2 months now and although the initial novelty of something new has worn off it's not so bad, and don't really have the "I don't wont to go to work" syndrome that seems to affect many.

My relative comfort with the job doesn't mean that it's not without incident though, something bizarre usually happens everyday, whether it's been students taking the piss out of my feet with " you have chicken feet ha ha ha", or children spontaneoulsy breaking out into war (resulting in tears everywhere) and comedy mispellings...my favourite of which is one of my students Bob adament that his name was spelt "Boob".

I nearly lost it with that one in class, in the way that when tired it only takes something stupid like that to set you off.
Unfortunately and like most times, it was only me who thought that was funny...with my 8 year old audience not undertstanding the full comedy value....and perhaps that was a good thing, not something I want to have to explain.

Am having real trouble putting pics on at the moment, but will keep trying as I have some pictures from my classes as well as downtown Shanghai to show you all.

Next blog will be life in general in Shanghai, with all the good bad and ugly bits of life in China.

Monday, June 12, 2006

SHANGHAI

OK, so after quite a lot of inactivity on the blog means that I have alot to post now, both out of a sense of guilt at my recent form as well as a number of things worthy of update!

So as planned (well, kind of) I find myself in Shanghai back with some old (in comparitive terms) friends I met in Vietnam discussing my options over Sushi and overlooking the eye melting neon fest that is downtown Shanghai.

Initial conclusions suggest that I should look for a teaching post given China's desperation to match it's linguistic skills in line with it's economic growth. All of my soon to be friends (at that point) were of the same opinion, with most saying that finding a teaching job here "a piece of p*ss" and would take "no time".

3 weeks after this clarevoyant advice I was still an unemployed layabout and was beignning to question the wisdom of these new found people as well as my prospects as an employable member of society!

Just as things were starting to look bleak and become an issue, with othe jobs such as stuntman, movie extra and organ donor looking a more likely option I got a reply to one of my applications from a company called 'Let's Goal Oxford English' for a teaching position. Lesson 1 I thought would be to to get a company name atht actually MAKES SENSE in English if you're supposed to be teaching it!

After a couple of meetings and convincing them (?!) that my lack of experience wasn''t a problem with a demo lesson I signed my life away to a teahcing contract and all was looking good on the woork front! Nice.

All I had to do now was figure out what you're supposed to do with a textbook that looks like it was deisgned by the students rather than for them, and how to handle a classroom of 30 Chinese 7 year olds!

My successful acquisition of a job actually led me briefly back to my job search. This was in the same way that when you go shopping and buy something you always look at the windows of other stores to see if your pair of shoes / trousers / handcuffs / whatever was the bargain you hoped it was and not 5 quid cheaper down the road!

Whilst I was quite pleased with myself at the lack of anything significantly better I was just about to close my internet window when I noticed a little button named 'control panel'.

As I was a signed up, logged in member of this website (it had been the my main area of looking given the fact it was in English!) I thought I'd have a look and see what benefits I get for handing all my details over to these people.
The 'control panel' itself was quite interesting, with all sorts of helpful things (that I'd obviously ingored) like saving searches, looking for specific employers etc, which I thought was all very nice until I saw another small button on the left called 'Inbox (12)'.

Any kind of inbox was news to me as when signing up I gave them my personal e-mail address, understanding that any communications would be handled that way.
Not the case, as my discovery found several more than useful job leads and interview requests, all of which would have been useful 3 weeks ago!
These initial friendly inviting e-mails had then been followed up by "please get in touch with us" messages, although am sure the undertone was more fo a "why are you ignoring us, don't you need a job!!??"

SBE #4,713. Enough said.

So after further confirmation that I would have been better off bringing a brain with me when leaving the UK rather than a backpack, I could at least say that I was not quite the unemployable, gambling, beer swilling layabout I thought...well not as far as prospective employers are concerned anyway!

Right, so now I've actually got myself some employment I will be elaborating on what you're actually supposed to do when teaching out here, as well as what I actually do!

Pics to come soon as always!
Web Page Counters