For Those About to Rock

I've had a couple people ask me what my lessons are like, so I got one of the Chinese teachers at the Greenland school to record some parts of one of my classes.

So without further ado, here's part one of the videos.

I Swear These People are Trying to Kill Me

It's lunchtime at Green Land. I feel like I'm about to drop. That's exagerating, but I'm still tired.

I guess it was decided somewhere that I would be working occasionally at the Green Land school until Graeme leaves. Hopefully at that time I will go back to being only at Jin Du and Jin Yuan. Green Land is a large (for Kid Castle) school on the edge of the city. With all the haze today, it makes the school look like the one source of life in a post appocolyptic city. As far as I can see (not that far) there are only run down buildings and large piles of earth.

I got a message just before 8:30 today, telling me that they would be a bit late picking me up. When I got a call telling me they were there, I went out to the gate, and got another experience with the driving in China. I had a death grip on the arm rest.

When I arrived at Green Land, I had enough time to say hello to a couple people who's names I have already forgotten. I was promptly ushered upstairs to give my first class. It didn't go well, but it didn't suck. I can at least say that. I walked into the class, and the teacher handed me some flash cards of what to teach.

I'm beginning to understand how Graeme feels. I walk into the class, say hello, get handed some cards, and then I'm thrown to the sharks. The first thing I look for when I walk into the room is the clock. I'm trying to work on how long each ofmy classes takes. Depending on the age group it can be longer or shorter. The number of flash cards I get handed can also effect how esay those minutes go. I've been here about two hours, and I've already given classes, give or take. I'm being moved around so fast here that I quickly lost track.

At all the schools, from 11:00 to 3:00 is lunch/break/nap time. I get my lunch in a little bit here, but for the next three and a half hours, I'm on my own for entertainment. At Jin Du and Jin Yuan I could get back home in fifteen minutes. So I usually had plenty of time to have a bite to eat, grab something at the lotus, watch a movie at home, or even just take a nap in my own bed. It was about a fifteen minute ride from Gao Ke Hua Yuan to here, so don't think that is an option today.

I should be going to Jin Yuan tomorrow, so compared to today it will be a walk in the park. No matter how many classes I have to teach.

I'm enjoying the job, and I'll do it wherever they want me to. But I still will like it better once I can get a nice steady schedule.

My Schools, and Their Schools

Before I get this post started, I need to explain a bit about Kid Castle. Kid Castle is a chain company of private schools that specialize in teaching English. There are more than ten of these schools in Xi'an, and even more in the rest of China, Taiwan, and possibly other countries. Like some china companies, some of them can be privately owned. My head bosses, Sara, Micheal, and Eric are all from Taiwan, and together they own somewhere between four to six schools here in Xi'an. The rest are part of the regular corporation, and are run by a woman named Lancome. Apparently she's a fan of the perfume or something.

A few weeks before I came here, my mom found this forum post. I was fairly nervous about coming to work for Kid Castle because of it, but I was still optimistic that it wouldn't be as bad as they guy made things out to be. If you didn't read the post, the guy basically says that the school didn't pay him according to contract, attacked him, and even tried to have him arrested when he tried to leave. A while ago when some of the other teachers cam over to my place to hang out, this guy somehow came up in conversation. From what a guy who knew a guy who new this guy says, he was actually a real ass and had a lot of it coming to him, but working at the schools he worked for can be fairly crappy. that was when I remembered that I signed two different contracts with Kid Castle. The first one was for one of these schools owned by the Lancome woman. I'm still not sure how it happened, probably due to them being fairly crappy, I stopped getting emails from them and started getting emails from a woman named Sara. I signed a different contract with her and now work at the privately owned Kid Castles in a different part of the city than the Lancome ones. I've talked to a Lancome school teacher and she says that things can get kind of crappy some times, but they've never been near as bad as the forum poster makes them out to be. Since I live next to other teachers for the private school, I've talked to them plenty, and while they say that there have been the occasional hang-ups, things have always been resolved fairly easily.

So far everything has gone fairly well for me, and I haven't had anything to complain about. I probably used a good bit of luck to get to where I am, but it doesn't look like I'll need much more to keep things going at an even pace.