a break for myself

This week is a 6-day work week. Students have to attend class and teachers have to work Monday to Saturday. Why? Because next week is National Holiday Week, and all of us get an entire week off. I will be heading to Hong Kong during this time... can't wait to see family and friends!

To drive my classes slowly and steadily into this week-long holiday, I've launched three of my four blocks into research assignments. This way, they don't have to listen to me talk, and I don't have to plan as much. This is a little treat for myself before coming back from holidays and having to run into a long, long haul of work from October to mid-January with no breaks. This I am dreading.

A thing that has been annoying me lately is the sudden disappearance of students for days on end. Most of the time, they are suspended for things like smoking or escaping from dorms. I don't have to deal with the suspensions, but it bugs me like crazy that the counsellors never notify the teachers of what's going on. It's pretty much up to me to solve cases of disappearing students. And then there are the sudden pull-outs of students from classes by counsellors. Who knows why the counsellors need certain students to sit in their office all block... why can't they ever let me know beforehand???

Despite this and being drowned by paperwork this week, I can't believe tomorrow's Wednesday already! Time flies in this school.

another last-minute surprise

ML has got to have the most disorganized class scheduling system on the planet. On Friday, the principal told me that a new class has been created for a group of failing students - English 11 - which (surpise surprise) I have been assigned to teach, starting Monday. How is it possible that ALL of my teaching assignments this year were given to me the day before the courses start?? To make matters worse, I just realized the pressure of having this class because these kids, who are actually in gr. 12, are taking English 11 first semester with me, in hopes that they will pass and can go onto English 12 next semester, where hopefully they will also pass so they will graduate on time with their peers. If I can't help them pass, they will not graduate on time. Arrrgh.

11-hour work days + weekends in the office is no fun.

awkward silence

During my teacher ed program, my instructors always joked about awkward silences that occur in classrooms when teachers don't get a response from students. I think that no teacher has experienced truly awkward silence unless he or she has taught a class of Chinese students in China. Kids here refuse to voluntarily answer questions, resulting in me having to call on students randomly (which I absolutely hate doing). Here, every class, I'm begging for responses. Hopefully things get better once the kids are used to it. I also eliminated my rule of hand-raising since they never do anyway. When I ask them to do it, they'd rather not talk. It's surprising that things like this slip in the Chinese education system although it is overall so much stricter than the Western way of things.

Today is my second day of teaching, and I would not use the word "great" or even "good" to describe it. I am so under-preprared because of last-minute teaching assignments, and I am still struggling to get the kids talking when i want them to, and shutting up when I'm talking. Hopefully, next week, things will be running smoother and will flow better.

I want to upload pictures, but the school internet is too ridiculously slow. Sorry!