haonowshaokao

I’ve been teaching an adult “business” class in the evenings and loving it. It’s like a little party where everyone has fun and I tell them all what to do and get paid for it. If I could do this all the time the novelty would probably wear off.
Also this week we moved flat, from a shitty place on the 7th floor to a slightly smaller luxury place on the 20th. Another easy move this one, took three trips in the lift to transport my possessions. This new home is probably the second best flat I’ve ever had, with by far the best view. I’ll post some pictures when I figure out how. My flatmate Brent’s girlfriend Samantha from the Philippines arrived two days back so it’s the three of us now. I thought I’d have one last night in the shithole and woke up with a massively swollen eyelid, having been bitten by some form of local insect. The swelling has subsided over the last two days without anything more than bite cream. Everyone was trying to get me to go to the hospital but I thought it was unneccessary and it looks like I was right. Some of my adult students told the front desk staff to take care of me which is sweet of them but a little annoying too.

Also I have to confess I genuinely enjoy reading this kind of thing. Still.

I got a call from my school last weekend telling me I had been given more hours. The four new classes were at the middle school on the other end of town and each had fifty students. It was an identical scenario to the one I’d been warned of by various people in Prague and which had kept me awake at least once. I asked if I could change to something more familiar – say, adults – but didn’t push it too much. I don’t want to get people’s backs up, especially in my first month here. Not getting angry with people is the most important thing here, so I just let it lie.
Walking in there and standing up on a podium with what looked like a sea of talking kids I realised I actually didn’t care. There was nobody watching me, nobody to pass any judgment on how well I was teaching them and they weren’t even badly behaved. We talked a bit, played hangman, that was pretty much it. Second class was the same. Easiest lessons ever.
Then on Wednesday I was told that I was being switched to business classes instead. These will require more preparation but I’ll get to wear my suit again.

Two weeks ago, when I had my first ever class here, I was warned by another teacher that I’d been given a collection of some of the worst behaved students in the school. She singled out a few in particular I should watch out for. Special attention was given to one in particular – a disproportionately large child with a strange name. From the start I saw what she meant. The students talked all the time, got up and walked around and even punched each-other occasionally. My well-meaning but largely half-hearted attempts to get them to behave were ineffectual, especially on the big one, and I left it at that.
In their third lesson the parents were supposed to come in for the last ten minutes. I got the kids playing a pictionary style game and turned around to let the parents in, but turned back to see the kids fighting in the middle of the floor. For ten minutes I attempted to break them up and get some control over the other screaming kids. Finally I had them playing the game in front of their folks and let them go. It was only when they’d all left the room that my assistant informed me that the fight started because the other kids were teasing the big one and that he’d been hurt and was crying. Visions of the parents going en masse to the front desk and demanding that I be fired and possibly sued went through my head.
The next day I implemented my new ‘three strikes and you’re out’ regime with some threatening looks and got through the class with little or no difficulty. At the end the big one came back in with his mother who “wanted to speak to me.” I braced myself for (at best) a telling off, but instead of complaining that I’d injured her child she started instead to tell me how much her kid enjoys the class and how much he likes me. I said he’d been very well-behaved in the lesson, which was true.
Since then he’s been one of the best behaved kids in the class.