My first class trip to crazy town!

Hello Everyone! Today, I was having a pretty great day. I got to talk to Laura and my Mom for a long time over Skype, which made me feel a lot better. I went to work and planned for today's classes and started planning for Thursday's lessons. I even got one workshop out of the way with John, the Center Director. We talked about parent teacher communication and the difference between Western and Eastern parents and I learned a lot. Since families in China are only allowed to have one child, they just want to provide that child with a lot of love and the best opportunities possible. I know that the school I am working has families that make a good income, but I have also learned that there are families that are scrapping by in order to provide their students with the opportunity to learn English in order for them to have more academic and career opportunities in the future.

However, while I was busy running around my first classroom tonight to prepare for the lesson, a child went a wild kingdom and started beating up another boy. The TA and I pulled the kid off of the other child and brought them both out to their parents. The TA was able to tell the parent and child who was acting like a bully that it was not acceptable behavior in the classroom. However, when he entered the classroom, he sat right next to boy he had been wailing on. I asked the TA to ask the mother to help us encourage him to move to another part of the room, but the mother said it was fine. The child continued to be awful during the rest of the class, which ruined the learning and fun for the other children and drove any patience out of the TA and I. It was a rough hour. The mom complained when I didn't give the child a reward sticker at the end of the class!

My next class was from 7:15 to 8:15 PM with fifteen three-year-olds. The first forty-five minutes were pretty good, but the last fifteen minutes were utterly chaotic. The children just lost it. I don't blame them, because it is so late for little ones. I am learning to not push any academic material at them, but mostly everyone was running around like little monsters at the end.

I went back to the staff room feeling defeated. One of the other foreign teachers, Sarah from South Africa, saw me and announced we were going out for a beer. She rounded up Cindy, one of the local teachers, and we each bought a can of Chinese PABST Blue Ribbon and sat in a little park outside one of the media village's and talked. It was really kind of them. Sarah said she recognized my "I had an awful day and I have no one to go home and talk to, stuck in this place" face, because she wore it often for the first bit of time in Beijing. We swapped being picked up at the airport and feeling just dumped in this place experiences, and it was really nice to talk to someone who has been through it. Cindy was so sweet just listening. She is considered really independent for a young Chinese woman here because she isn't married and does not live with her parents.

We were getting ready to leave when Claire, our Senior teacher at the school, came around and said she was taking us out for another round. We got into a taxi and went to a restaurant in Cindy's neighborhood. We talked about working at the school and all of their different traveling experiences. It was pretty awesome sitting at a table where every person was from a different country, but we've all ended teaching in the same school. It was a fantastic, unexpected beginning of my "weekend."