Teaching Schedule

Your teaching schedule could be a bit different than mine. Mine is different than the teacher's before me. It will probably be similar though. 

Your schedule should be the same for every day, Monday through Friday and you will teach all of your classes everyday (I have six classes a day, five days a week). 

They will provide breakfast and lunch for you and a stipend for dinners and weekend meals. (Me, Cierra: Honestly, I most likely won't eat breakfast of lunch with them. I am not a fan of most of their breakfast and get sick of cafeteria food and it made me sick last time...)They will probably want you to be at the school at 8 AM for breakfast. The guards at the gate will give you breakfast (usually some kind of rice milk (YUCK! Don't like it), some stuffed steamed buns (Yum!), maybe a hard-boiled egg (okay), or maybe something from the bakery (yum!)), which you can eat in the guard room. Then at about 8:10 they will probably want you to stand at the front doors of the school to say hello to the kids. At the end of the day they also have you stand at the doors to say bye to the kids. They wanted me to do this everyday, but it seemed a little unnecessary to me to do it that much, so Spencer told me I only needed to do it 2 days a week. 

The kids do their morning exercises and then my first class starts at 9 AM. The first day they wanted me to get up in front of all the kids and parents in the morning during the time they normally do exercises and introduce some kids and do a small game with them. If they have you do this, don't sweat it. Glory (she is your liason) told me exactly what to do beforehand. I had to do this twice within the first week or two. Glory told me I would have to do it everyday, but they actually never had me do it any more than just those 2 times.

 In the morning I'm at the school teaching classes from 9-10:45. I have 3 fifteen minute classes (WOW!!! That's it?) with kids who are about 3 years old. Then I do ten minutes with the "baby" class, which are the 2 year olds. Then I have one 15 minute class with the older kids who I think are about 5-6 years old. Then it's lunch time which you can eat with the teachers at school. I do that sometimes, but often I prefer to go home to eat lunch (I just don't have much taste for the school food, to be honest). 

After morning classes and lunch, I have a break for a few hours while the kids take a nap, (Favorite part of the day!) so I usually go home. Then I have to be back at the school at 2:40 for another 15 minute class in the afternoon with a class of 4-5 year olds. After that, I always go to Glory's class (also 4-5 year olds) and hang out in there for about an hour till school is over. Sometimes she has me teach a 15 minute lesson in her class, but most of the time I just sit in there, talk and play with the kids, or help out if she asks me to do something. School gets out at 4 PM.

 Also, with each of these classes the kids will stay in their classrooms and you will move from class to class. There will always be at least one Chinese teacher in the class, usually more like 2 or even 3. Mostly at least one of these teachers will speak a little English and can help you if you need, though sometimes it is still a little hard to be understood by them, because most of them don't speak English very well. Glory probably speaks the best English of any of the teachers there, so she makes a good liason, though her English is not perfect either. Glory is a really nice person and is definitely willing to help you when you need something. She gets a little busy and can sometimes be a little forgetful, so sometimes you might need to remind her several times about things. However, she really does want to help and does try. She's actually a very sweet person and you can tell she really likes teaching the kids.