first day back to work

i have just finished my first day of my last semester of my last year teaching in china. i am teaching 16 hours each week this semester, it will be the fewest hours i have ever worked in one semester. gladly, i am back to teaching listening and speaking. i have taught a large variety of courses in china. these include oral english, newspaper reading and writing, the society and culture of major english speaking counties, reading and writing, and listening and speaking. i love listening and speaking. it can be a very exciting and active class, especially with the right group of kids. i also like it because more than the other courses, i am able to get to know the students personally.

each class that i am working with has 40 students. i see 8 of these classes a week. on the one hand, it is good, i only have to write one lesson plan. on the other hand, i have to teach the same lesson plan 8 times. i taught the same lesson plan four times last semester and was bored. i wonder how i will do with this. each class is an hour and a half long. we start on the hour and work for 45 minutes. the students then get a 10 minute break (when total pandemonium normally takes over my classroom), and then i attempt to control them for another 45 minutes. often, because the break can be so disruptive, i work them for an hour and a half and let them go. i think they like it better, and i do too.

the students all have english names. after having been this long in china, i wouldn't have any difficulty with their chinese names, but for a new foreign teacher, it would be extremely difficult. most of the names are pretty average, but there are those who stick out. i have a student named firewolf. he's a great kid. i have kids named rain, sky, write, flick, heaven, and robot. a lot of boys pick the names of sports figures. i have a beckham and an iverson in every class. sometimes they have a little difficulty with which names are for girls and which are for boys. of the eight classes i have, i taught four of them last semester in reading and writing. duff taught the other four classes. now, i have everyone for listening and speaking and he has taken over all of the reading and writing. all of last semester, duff and i compared our classes. the consensus was that my students all came to class and then misbehaved (riotously) and none of his came, but those who did were well behaved and did their work. i am curious to see if this is true, and if it changes this semester. i have only taught two classes so far. duff's students (12 out of 40 showed up) were so quiet!! i couldn't get them to interact with me at all. the kids who i had last semester (38 out of 40 showed up) were boisterous and talkative. i have about half of my classes now in media rooms. this is great for listening and speaking. i took in a slide show for the first day with pictures from our trip. i told them about what we saw in sri lanka, they remembered the tsunami. i showed them some of the more amazing pictures from india. the one of us on the elephant, one of some monkeys, the one of a cow about to knock me over (i was bumped hard, from behind, by a number of cows during our travels. one made me fall over. in hampi, this had happened a number of times. it is a small town and i guess people noticed, because by the end of our time there, people were warning me when a cow was approaching me from behind. duff thinks some of these incidents could be due to my bright red backpack). the kids in class were calling out, demanding to know what items in the picture were called in english, and shouting out words i asked for in chinese. i now know the chinese for elephant, monkey, laundry, and coconut.

overall, a great first day back in class. oh, and we have no night or weekend classes this semester. joy! the night classes last semester were really rough.