Weifang No. 1 Middle School

Aside from eating copious amounts of greasy meaty delicious food, being gawked at in public, and gawking right back at the public, I am here on a teaching contract. So, here's a bit of shop talk to start us off: I work at Weifang No. 1 Middle School along with a great group of ten other teachers, a vice principal and a principal. And several other Chinese teachers, principals, school leaders, etc. but most importantly two amazing go-to ladies that take care of our school/apartment/internet/phone/banking/everything-in-life needs. All of us Canadians are BC certified teachers as we are a BC Offshore School that is the International Department at Weifang No. 1. This means that we teach BC curriculum, are inspected by the ministry, and run a BC high school equivalent... except that it's not much like any high school I've seen in BC (details to follow). 

I am teaching ESL 10, Communications 11 (pretty much "English-Lite"), and Fundamentals of Mathematics and Precalculus 10. This is to say, I am legitimately teaching English and, as for math, the kids are teaching me while I am providing language support, crowd control, and a study regimen. Laugh if you must, but do you really know how to find the surface area and volume of prisms and cones? Don't even start me on this trigonometry stuff... 

Classes start at 7 am. We have five 45 minute blocks, then a provincially imposed nap break from 11:30 am until 1:45 pm. Then, we have one more block before we are done at 2:30 pm. The poor students though- they stay and do their Chinese classes until about 8:30 pm. My average school day consists of waking up at 5:15 am, drinking as much black tea as possible, eating a bowl of what I like to call China Oatmeal (quick oats with almonds, goji berries, pears, etc.), and then meeting up with some other teachers to split a cab to school. I then teach English or get taught some math. Then, at lunch, I go to the cafeteria or the street vendors (see later post, I promise) for some delectable local fare and then I pretend to plan lessons and mark until I doze off in my office chair. Finally, I teach that one last block and then we teachers head home or to the Starbucks to plan for the next day. Really often, we go out for some dinner and then head back to our apartments for an early night. It sickens me that I am often fast asleep by 8 pm for two main reasons: 1) It's 8 pm! Am I 80 years old?!? 2) Those poor students are still in class! 

So far the biggest challenges with teaching are:

1. The students are super ESL. More accurately, most of the grade 10s don't speak English at all. Comprehension is limited. I am developing a seriously strange manner of speaking where I. speak. really. slowly. and. clearly. and. use. simple. words. and. repeat. things. over. and. over. again. with. hand. gestures. In. fact. sometimes. the. habit. carries. over. into. con.ver.sat.ions. that. I. am. hav.ing. with. other. teachers. Everyone who is teaching grade 10 is having this issue. It gets better. The grade 11s are okay, although some of them are still really low. It makes you adapt your style in a hurry. No dry humour. No slang. Never assume your instructions are clear. 

2. A serious lack of English language resources. I won't do that awful teachery thing where I go on and on about resources... just trust me when I say that it's hard to teach English when you are one of the only English resources available to you.

All in all though, it's a pretty sweet the gig. The people I work with are fabulous. The kids are pretty hilarious. And yes, I am learning a lot. 

Okay, onto the photos. 

Here we are in our office on the first day of school. From left: Randi, Sinead, me, Vincent, Celeste, and Sam. 

For the first week of school, all the grade 10s have mandatory military training. It looked pretty intense. And, it was effing hot out. Here we teacher folk are approaching the young troops who are getting ready for a school wide assembly.

They were marching and standing pretty much all day. By the end of the week, they were looking pretty sharp. And possibly traumatized.

Even their water bottles were lined up in perfect rows.

These guys yelled at them all day. Did I mention that they have to march around to the same song over and over and over and over again all week? Yeah. Trauma.

In this first week of school there was a school wide assembly to officially open the school and give out awards from last year. And of course, listen to speeches that I assume were just as boring for the kids as they were for us even though the kids understand Chinese. So here we have some teacher feet.

And some teacher faces. Clockwise from me: Sam, Randi, Joey, Sinead, Vincent, and Colin.

Being the only foreigners on campus (and a fair percentage of the foreigner population in Weifang), we were placed at the front as to be shown off. This is because Weifang (and I think China in general) is actively working on self-promoting as an "international" city/country. I mean, there are definitely more dimensions to this conversation... just know that at the moment, we have serious celebrity status. It's a mixture of entertaining, terrifying, unsettling, vanity-provoking, ego-boosting, awesome, and disturbing. But, here we are front and centre.

This prime seating actually kinda sucked because we had to pretend to understand and be interested in the speeches that did not understand at all. So, we took a lot of photos.

Flag bearing for the anthem:

And of course there were fireworks and confetti!

Weifang No. 1 Middle School has about 6,000 students. And they all live on campus. So do the teachers. Recently, I heard that it's the biggest school in Asia. No fact checks done as of yet but yep... it's the size of a small town in Canada.

And the sky above the school was really cool and clear looking that day...

And we decided that this is our album cover for our teacher emo band called "One Middle." From left, Sinead on keyboard, Vince on bass, Colin on the drums, me on vocals and triangle. Joey is our stage manager, Randi does promo, and Sam manages. It's good to have a back-up plan if this teaching thing doesn't pan out.

Finally, Sam and I like to wear corresponding teacher outfits to school.