Teaching life

Since I’m now working for exactly two months in Wuhu, it’s about time to tell something about the teaching experience. To start with my students, I teach children (some just out of the baby stage) from 3 years old to adults from about 28 years. However most students I have are middle school students, I teach about 650 of those students between the age 14 to 16, divided over 11 classes.

So let’s start with this middle school. This one is definitely the most difficult and after 2 months I’m still not completely sure how to deal with this school. The difficult thing is one, that the classes consist of 50 to 60 students and two, most students don’t understand what I mean if I’m speaking English to them. This makes the students lose interest before the lesson has started and makes the classroom a bit difficult to control. Apart from this there is a third problem in this school and that’s a different perspective on teaching and learning. In these classrooms I have encountered several cultural clashes. I’ll not get into much detail in this post, but let’s just say that I expect different things of the students than the Chinese teachers do. The students on the other hand expect a similar teacher to their Chinese teacher, with only a different background. One small example; one student beats another students with an plastic bottle on the head, I call her to explain herself, she stands up and looks down outside the window. I want her to look at me cause I think it’s very rude not to look at the teacher if he asks a question, so I ask her again to explain herself to me. My assistant explains it to her in Chinese, but her behavior doesn’t change. So I send her out of my classroom. The rest of the class thinks this is unfair, but doesn’t protest. One of the students explains to me that looking down for Chinese students towards the teacher, is supposed to show respect for the teacher. It sounds strange but I think it’s true cause I noticed it more often now, actually it happens about every time I ask a question to which the student doesn’t know the answer. This is just one small example of the cultural problems I encounter at this middle school.

Ok, let’s go the small ones. The kindergarten’s are the places where probably the most money is involved, parents send their precious only child to these places to make sure the 3 year old will be ahead when he starts his real education. In China this is almost always an only child and that makes the parents willing to spend/waste/invest a huge amount of money in this child. These kids are learning English from when they are 3 years old! In a city were basically no one speaks any English at all. It’s crazy if you ask me.

So what do I do in these classes? Well I wasn’t looking forward to these classes at first, but these classes actually turn out to be to most easy of the teaching. Well teaching might not be the right word for it. Usually I review some easy words they have learned before and after that we’ll do a game and then class is over. These classes are only 20 minutes and there are always a few girls who accompany the children, and who are quite helpful, which sometimes makes me feel like I only have to be present and think of what to do.

Finally the adult class. This is the only class I am completely on my own, without any assistance. This class is quite easy as well and a bit more serious than the other ones, this is about the only class where, I feel that I’m teaching and where the students can understand most of what I’m saying as long as I speak slowly. My class is spoken English so I don’t need to explain any difficult grammar issues. This class is also a lot smaller and is the only class where I know all the English names of my students. This makes it possible for me to get to know the students and because their English is a bit better than that of those at the middle school, it’s nice to get a little more interesting conversations than the usual “Do you like China?” and “Do you like Chinese food?”

All in all the teaching has been worth to try. I learned a lot here and although it can be difficult sometimes it can be enjoyable on other times. It’s just sad to think in numbers; about 650 or more students at the middle school and only about 10 which I can have a nice conversation with. I’m not sure how long I will stay here, it’s not completely up to me I’m afraid cause they can fire me when there’s no work anymore. However if it’s up to me I’ll stay here until the start of the summer. At least that’s the plan for now.

Frustration

Going abroad is just as exciting as it can be difficult. Because I thought of this before I went to China, I thought it would be a good idea to read some things about Chinese culture and about common difficulties Westerners encounter when they go to China. I’m very glad that I did these readings and happily enough I also studied a bit of Chinese before I came here. Of course the real experience is very different from reading about possible difficulties, but things like, last minute changes in my work schedule are easier to accept because I’m already counting on things like this to happen. And it’s good to know that in certain touristic places in Beijing, there are people who will try to get money out of you in an unpleasant way. These infamous teagirls and art students don’t exist in Wuhu though.

So far my stay in China has been relatively easy and so far I haven’t experienced any major difficulties. Which is partly thanks to some good preparation and probably for a greater deal thanks to some luck. This said there is just one thing which simply frustrates me here and which was not mentioned anywhere. I’ll probably be the first to write about this small problem with live in Wuhu. I’m not exactly sure if this is a problem I only have with Wuhu or with China in general.

So what is it? Well as you know one of my hobbies is football and I’m quite a big supporter of the Football club Ajax. In March they still played in the Eufa cup and sometimes it wasn’t that easy to get up in the middle of the night to watch the match in bad quality on my computer. But on the other hand it was great that I could watch the match live all the way in China. So although I did encounter a small amount of homesickness during some matches this is not which leads to my frustration. No, but you have to understand that in Holland there is another footballclub which is the big rival of Ajax, and this rival manages to frustrate me more in Wuhu than it did in Amsterdam…

The first week I was in Wuhu I walked past a Kappa store. Which is not so strange because there are a lot of shops from the big branches like Adidas, Nike, Kappa and so on. However what was strange, was that when I walked past this shop, I looked in the window and was shocked. I use the word shocked to indicate that I was more than surprised and to add some negative feeling. (Because in China there are more than enough surprises.) At first I couldn’t believe my eyes, but in the window I saw a Kappa sporting jacket. Ok this still makes sense, it was a Kappa store after all. But, wait… on the jacket there was a certain logo… of a certain Dutch football club… feyenoord… How on earth could that happen to be in a shop in Wuhu? And how on earth could anyone ever think of selling the ugly thing? And finally would there actually be anyone that stupid to buy it???

In my first week in Wuhu I did not see these clothes and I almost forgot about it. Until I saw the first Chinese person wearing this jacket. It was weird, I felt some anger towards him, but I didn’t show it and tried to ignore him, although it did get me wondering if he had any idea of what he was wearing. At the moment I have seen several Chinese people wear this jacket and although this might sound as a minor thing, for me this is one of the biggest frustrations of live in Wuhu. A lot of things which I’m not used to and not too pleased with, I can accept because I’m a guest here and I can be glad that it’s different back home. But this is hard to accept for me, mainly because they really have no idea of what they are wearing… They really don’t have any clue, I asked two of them and they told me that they had no idea what it was.

So finally a small suggestion from me, please don’t buy anything from Kappa in the future. You can stop buying any products from puma as well from now one, cause in the near future, only a few months from now, this will be the new sponsor of that other club. Happily enough puma is not doing so good in China, at least not in Wuhu, even though Usain Bolt showed his golden puma shoes a lot longer than his race lasted at the Olympics. On the other side, I’m afraid that since Wuhu is lacking behind a bit, these kappa clothes that frustrate me will be sold long after I leave this place.

I just wish there where more Chinese wearing jackets like this, and actually knowing what they're wearing.

Fuwuyuan

Another observation mainly made in restaurants, but it’s the same in a lot of shops, hotels, bars and even a place like the gym. Not that I go to the gym, but I did take a look there, cause a lot of Chinese people see this as a new modern thing, and the gym promoters have given me about 10 flyers of the two competing gyms this city has.

When I enter a restaurant in China, at the door there is usually one, two, or even a line of waitresses standing to open the door for me and to welcome me. The amount of people at the door depends a bit on how expensive the restaurant is and how many guests they have at that moment. This means that if we eat in a more expensive place (for Wuhu/China, this is close to the price of junk food in Amsterdam) and we happen to be the only guests, that it’s not uncommon to be welcomed by a big group of waitresses. This is kind of amusing while at the same time a bit intimidating sometimes.

Somewhere the behavior of the waitresses reminds me a bit of restaurants in America. In America the waiters are very welcoming and friendly but they have to be, because their salary is made out of tips and of course they only get a good tip if they do a good job. In China however there are no tips and I’m sure that if you try to give one they will give back the money. How they do get their salary is a very good question, cause the food and especially the drinks are sold in restaurants for only a few kuai more than the cost price. If I buy a beer in a normal restaurant it will cost me about 5 kuai, which is almost 60 eurocents. This bottle will cost about 4 kuai in the supermarket and I’m sure the restaurants can get it for less, but there’s no need for math to figure out that they earn far less with drinks as the restaurants in Holland do.

This small and amusing restaurant observation leads to the biggest problem China has, and which is the main reason for almost all the other problems this country has to face. Whether it’s pollution, unemployment, poverty, human rights or social unrest, it’s all because of the massive population. Everywhere you go there are people. Too much people. I come from one of the most populated countries in the world, but it feels empty compared to China. Numbers are overrated in my opinion and they are not much more than a indicator. However just to think about, for every Dutch person on this planet there are almost (unofficially 1.5 billion Chinese) a hundred Chinese people. So one Dutch person equals 9 Chinese football teams plus coach. In comparison, one Dutch person would only equal about 20 Americans. Not even two football teams! China is about the same size as the United States, maybe a little bigger.

A normal evening at Nanjing train station.

Paradoxical this population problem is also the cause of the whole China hype, and the main reason why the rapid economic growth is possible. Employment is extremely cheap because there are too much people to do the job, this makes it possible for employers like restaurants to have more staff than guests on some days. This makes service in restaurants in general very good, because the waiters and waitresses have a very high interest in keeping their job and in China there is usually someone to watch them doing their job.