Another thing about living in China is that hardly anything is in my control. And things change repeatedly. And I never find out about anything until last minute.
I moved to China with a contract to teach Oral English, something I have experience in and enjoy doing. During training, my boss Nathan mentioned that they need two teachers to teach Writing and Composition as an academic course. I had tried to teach the British and American history course but one of the other oral english teachers beat me to it with a masters in history, so they hired him instead. So, I thought that teaching writing would still get my foot in the door and be more interesting to teach, and have a higher calibre of english because all of my students will be English majors.
I told Nathan I would be interested in teaching Writing, and he said he'd get back to me. I didn't find out that I was teaching it until the next day five minutes before the Academic team meeting started. And it turns out that no one has taught this course for 7 years and so there is no syllabus or precedence. This allows me some flexibility to do what I want but also require more work to unit plan, etc.
I didn't get my textbook until today (Friday) and finally got a chance to sit down with Nathan to ask some basic questions: is this a one semester or two semester course? (full year) How many classes will I teach? (5 classes as opposed to 9 oral english classes I was going to teach) How many students in each class? (50! That's why we only have five classes, because we need that time to grade papers).
I am teaching this class on Monday. I won't get my schedule until Sunday afternoon.
This is what I love and hate about China at the same time: this would never fly in America. But everyone operates like this in China. The government operates like this: last year they declared a national holiday a week before it was going to happen. Everyone just dropped what they were doing and rearranged their schedules and took a holiday./How crazy is that?
I am going to plan as much as I can for this class and just jump when they say jump. As much as I get frustrated, this is the way that China is and it's not going to stop for me. I just need to learn to roll with the punches, not complain, and be grateful that they are letting me teach a class that I'm not necessarily experienced in, but am willing to try my hand at.
As a side note, I've noticed that my spelling and word choice is slowly deteriorating. When I come back in Janurary, my English will be Chinese English and I will say things like "I wish you to be happy every day." Just wait.
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