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Hello again everyone. Sorry that I have taken so long to write again.
I have been in China for three months now so I thought I better update you. Although I am going to keep it short. The main thing I have been doing for the past three months is teaching.I began teachingnear the end of september. To be honest I didn't know what to expect until I came here, and I have always hated public speaking so this was going to be a new experience. However, I have to say that I have found myself enjoying teaching a lot and I become more confident each time. My first week of teaching included a very embaressing situation. I underestimated the heat and managed to faint in class. I was so embaressed, but at least the students were very kind and helped me. Apart from that, teaching has gone very well for the most part. I teach 5 classes for 4 periods each a week - so 20 periods of 45 minutes of teaching. Despite only doing 20 classes I am still very tired by the end of the week, which I find surprising and I feel sorry for the teachers in England. Each class has 40-60 students which makes teaching a challenge and I can never give enough teaching to all the students which is a pity.
Most of the students are very good and enthusiastic and I enjoy teaching them. However, there are some in the lower numbered classes which are not. All my classes are first year university students, but some are more engaged than others. One class in particular I have to discipline a lot and they try my patience. However, overall it is a positive experience.
Students from China seem to be a lot more hardworking than in England, although they are also much more oppressed than us and are not allowed to question anything or think for themselves. They regularly do 30 hours of study a week in university and spend a lot of extra time on top studying. As I walk around the campus, even late at night or early in the morning, there are hundreds of students reading the books and studying.
Teaching in China is very different from England and their lack of facilities is quite striking. The classrooms contain only a blackboard and chalk, no projector, tv or anything else like that. There is not even any air conditioning for the hot summers. There are also plenty of restictions on what we can teach too - no mentioning politics or religion (although I push that boundary a lot). We are given a textbook but it is for teaching all round english, even though I have to teach Oral English, so it is not really an appropriate book and the lessons where I teach from the textbook are usually boring for my students.
We also have to do something called English Corner every thursday evening, where all the foreign teachers here (there are seven of us) talk with students in English for an hour and a half. It is very informal, however we find it very boring because they ask the same questions every week. I am lucky enough to finish my teaching week on a thursday so after that I have a nice 3 day weekend.
Overall teaching is fun I think and I try to make it fun for my students by using games, role plays, debates and presentations, however, much of the time i'm not sure they do find it so interesting.
I have also been to a few other places in China which I want to tell you about. Back in October we had a week off for their national holiday and so I went with some other teachers to a National Park called Zhangjiajie. It is a park with lots of mountains and is very famous in China. The holiday was a bit of a wash out and only one day of the 4 was any good, but on that one day I had a lot of fun and took lots of pictures. We climbed a mountain, which took us 3 hours to get up. It must have been over 2000 steps and my legs ached for weeks afterwards lol, but I think it was worth it. I got many great pictures from the top and the views were stunning. The other days is was very rainy and foggy which ruined it really.
The other place I visited was Yiyang, this weekend. Yiyang is another big city in the same province as Changsha and takes about 1 hour by taxi to get to. It was quite a good holiday, even if I did have to stay up all night looking after one of the teachers in hospital because he had drank too much...ahem Rich! I got to see the city, which seems a lot more calm than Changsha and a lot more laid back. We went to a night club which was fun because the dance floor was bouncy.
Apart from that, not much else has happened. I did get a chance to try both snake and dog. The snake was too oily for me so I didn't really like it, but the dog was very nice. It tasted a little like beef, but with much more fat.
So, overall the last three months have been interesting and I am looking forward to my holiday in January. I have been feeling quite homesick and have decided that I won't be staying here longer than one year because I miss england a lot, however, i'm still glad I got a chance to come and have learnt a lot so far. Until next time....Zaijian!
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