North By North East| 11 min read
Leaving the U.K wasn’t a difficult decision to make, the only thing I felt hesitant about was the one question in my mind “would I make a good teacher?” I had taught informally before, offering tuition and I helped Spaniards practice their English for short time as part of a program in Spain. Although never before had I taught in a classroom environment. The only reason we have nerves though is because we are afraid of the unknown. Once I felt comfortable with this I was filled with excitement about my trip to China and where it could take me.
I arrived in Beijing and spent my time seeing the city and going through the training offered by Teach and Travel in China (TTC). It was an unforgettable experience because I not only had immense fun during the training and whilst exploring Beijing in my spare time but I was also amongst a group of people who would become my friends. So when our time in Beijing was coming to an end and we all found out where our placements were, I was filled with such excitement of going to a new part of China, not just to explore but to live and become a part of that place. At the same time though it was upsetting to leave so many good people behind. This was the hardest part of China for me, to go separate ways to the people who became your friends whilst you were there.
If you’re lucky though, you’ll stay in touch with these friends and will see them again soon. You can’t dwell too much on it because your experience in China is only just beginning, and I was just about to start my journey to Shenyang in Liaoning province in the North-East of China. Every intern’s experience of China is different, some might be seen as better than others but it is down to you to get the most out of your experience. That being said, I can only give an account of my experience of China and so far it has been a great one!
We left on the bus early on Saturday morning and we were driven to the train station, Rosemarie Clavin and I, who took the two week course with TTC in co-operation with i to i TEFL were joining eight people from the four week course offered by TTC as well meeting the TTC representative for Shenyang, Rice. We had only met each other a few times before, so it was a chance to get to know new people. The train to Shenyang took nearly four hours but the time passed quickly enough and before we knew it we had arrived.
Rice introduced us to our school contact, Jade, and we parted ways from the others in the group. This was the first time we were meeting someone officially from our school, so it was quite reserved. Jade walked us to where her van was parked and we climbed into the back. This was all completely unknown. In Beijing we had carved out a life, now we were starting from the beginning again.
Jade was with her family, including her daughter, because the school was still on a break and hadn’t officially started again. So they drove us straight to the police station so we could be registered as residents of Shenyang. The process wasn’t quick but nor was it slow, it just took a little time. It pays to be patient in China, and shortly we had our papers and were residents of Shenyang, our new home.
Jade then took us to the school campus where we would be staying and showed us to our rooms on the foreign teacher’s corridor of one of the buildings. I was taken aback by the room. It was large, spacious, with a desk in the corner surrounded by empty bookshelves with a telephone and a lamp sitting on it. Two armchairs and a coffee table were placed opposite my desk on the other side of the room, whilst a window the length of the wall lets in plenty of daylight. A large TV sits opposite my double bed, and a sliding door in-built wardrobe directly opposite my en-suite bathroom complete with western toilet. I don’t have many belongings so the room looks quite bare but I was expecting the worst and ended up with luxury. There is also a gigantic shared kitchen on our landing, with a whole row of tall fridges, tables and benches enough to have 20 people or more round them. Directly next to the kitchen is the laundry room with two washing machines, no dryer but they spin dry and the clothes dry out over night when the heating is on.
After dropping my belongings off, we met Jade again in the canteen and she had organised a meal for us because we were the only people on campus, and I was famished after the journey. With our meal she gave us canteen cards with 200 RMB on it to eat all our meals in the canteen. We would pay it back when our first subsistence payments start, it was an advance so we could cater for ourselves. The other thing was she mentioned to us was the school curfew, because the gates are locked after 10pm and we’d have to wake up the guard at the gate and Mr. Yung the guard in our building.
She then asked us if we had any further questions, we did, but we also didn’t want to hold her or her family up. So we left our questions till the next week, when teachers and students would be coming back to the school. Having said goodbye to Jade and her daughter, we passed the weekend as best we could.
We met up with Rice and the other interns the next day and had lunch together, which was great because we got the chance to sit down and have a conversation whilst eating amazing food. It was a short day though because we had to return back for our curfew and the following day was Monday and it was possible we would start having more involvement in the school.
Monday came and went though and we didn’t see anyone. The following morning I tried to get in touch with our contact Jade but the number I had for her on the school paperwork that we received was no longer in use. So I contacted Rice to see if he had any other contact information for her or if he could contact the school. He quickly replied saying that the school may contact us after lunch. Good news. I was eager to find out what we were going to be doing. Not long after this there was a knock at my door and Jade had come round to tell me the same. We would see her in the afternoon and have a meeting with Mrs Gao, the vice principal of the school in charge of the languages department.
The meeting was quite a strange experience for me. We left our rooms dressed in our teacher’s best and went to one of the teaching buildings on campus and were guided to the vice principals office. We were formally introduced to Mrs Gao, to Lucy who would become our Mandarin teacher and who spoke English fluently and Jade was also present. The vice principal didn’t speak any English so we listened as she talked and then Lucy would translate it for us. The meeting was just welcoming us to the school and apologies that this was our first chance to have a meeting together because we had been here for three days already. Rosie and I were told about the two different classes that we would teach as the timetable for the students, including their Foreign English classes was still being drawn up, nor had they decided which one of us would be teaching which grade.
There were two possibilities, one of us would be teaching Junior 1, children who had just arrived at the school and the other would be teaching Junior 2 and Senior Class. We were told that there were course books available, but we were also free and encouraged to incorporate our own ideas into the lesson. One other thing that we may expect to do in the near future is to write the mid-term exam and the end of term exam for our classes. There would be some guidance about the content but again we were also given liberty to incorporate our own ideas. The course books would be made available to us in the next few days and our timetables would follow shortly afterwards. There were only a few things that the school wanted us to avoid in our classes. Religion and Politics, which we had known of previously because of our training with TTC and they also didn’t want us to show a film for the entire duration of a lesson. They wanted us to be there to teach students. This is something neither of us could disagree with.
Towards the end of the meeting, the vice principal asked us if we had any questions. The first of which that came to my mind was seeing the classrooms and the facilities that we would be working with. So after the meeting was concluded Jade and Lucy gave us a tour of the teaching buildings. The tour didn’t take long as this particular campus of the Yucai group isn’t huge, but it is well equipped. We were also shown to our office on the tour, it’s a shared office for all the Foreign Teachers. It’s a large, spacious, with six desks in it, as well as a sofa and two armchairs and one computer which has access to the internet. A window the length of the wall lets in what warmth the sun has to offer and so much light that it’s a nice place to pass the time when you’re not teaching a lesson.
A day or so past and Lucy came to meet us on our corridor and we had a brief meeting in our kitchen. We were given the course books for grades Junior 1 and Junior 2 and told which one we would be teaching. Rosie would be teaching Junior 1 and was to teach Junior 2 and Senior Class 3.2. Lucy explained to me that my classes would be quite challenging because the Seniors have a good level of English and many of them have fluency in it.
The challenge would come because there were no course books for the seniors, the entirety of the semester syllabus was completely up to me. She also mentioned that a previous intern, not my immediate predecessor, but a previous intern who took these classes was also a young man from the United Kingdom and struggled to meet the challenge of it and only taught for four days before he left. We joked and said I would at least try to make it to five days, but this made me a little nervous none-the-less. In hindsight this was probably the best thing she could have told me, as it allowed me to prepare well for all my classes and to assess the language levels in my Senior Class and what to expect from them and what they should be expecting from me.
