My week in Shanghai may be worth its own post someday, but it’s not terribly relevant to my teaching story, so… onwards!

CIEE placed me in a private K-12 school in Hefei, the capital of one of China’s poorer provinces, before I knew that many private schools in China are where rich parents send their kids if they fail to get good enough grades to get into public school. It was a boarding school where the kids lived in dorms, and the locals had their parents pick them up on the weekends while those from further away had to wait for the school to bus them home on holidays.

I had very little teaching experience at this point, especially to low-level students, so it was definitely a steep learning curve for me to learn my new trade while adapting to a new country and culture. I originally signed on for a year, but liked it enough to stay on for a third semester.

I arrived just before the Lantern Festival and was put to work almost immediately. Teachers would be paid at the end of the month, so I only had the $100 I exchanged at the airport to get me through the chilly February, including what I would spend on food and a Chinese cell phone.

(Speaking of that phone, it was a 300 RMB black-and-white Nokia brick that lasted me six years until KK and I got married and I was “encouraged” to get a smart phone to be able to use WeChat. The numbers had worn off the buttons by that point, but it called and texted just fine, which was all I needed it to do at that stage of my life).

I shared an office with the three other foreign teachers: two Filipino teachers who had been there a while, and Jim, an American who also came through CIEE. Jim was around 60 but I always felt he was younger than me at heart.

My main class was a group of about 20 high schoolers who were preparing to become exchange students in Singapore. They ranged in English level from near fluent to not even very familiar with their ABCs (any English teachers reading this probably just winced, not from such a low-level student, but from such a mix of levels in one class). When the administrators found out about my background, I ended up teaching some science courses to this group as well.

I also regularly taught two groups of Koreans during my first semester in Hefei. The first was a group of about 10 high schoolers who were pretty bright and were definitely more like a model English as a Foreign Language class. I generally looked forward to this class more than most, but they definitely don’t stick in my mind as much as the China-Singapore group.

The other Korean class was a family of three kids – two girls around middle school age and their little brother who was definitely still a little kid. They were usually fine in class, but acted up occasionally and were learning quite basic English.

Later on, I also taught some classes for the Chinese students just starting middle school, and I was “lent out” a couple times a week to an elementary school in another part of the city (as these types of schools are known to do with their foreign teachers) to teach basic English from a textbook while the regular teacher monitored me. These classes went fine but also were not very memorable.

One class that absolutely sticks in my mind, though, was the group of kindergarten students I was assigned to teach a few times a week during my last semester there (and may have played a part in my decision to move on). I got some use out of a few of the children’s books I brought with, and singing “Rain, Rain, Go Away” wasn’t too bad, but I found that it wasn’t for me.

This seems as good a time as any to talk briefly about being a foreigner in Hefei circa 2009. Jim and I were regularly stared at walking down the street, with a Chinese teacher once commenting that they were looking at me like I was a panda! It was not infrequent that we were stopped and asked to pose for a photo with a random passerby. I was likely the first westerner that some of these kids had seen, and they would often just go nuts in my presence, especially my own kindergarten group.

The biggest reason I enjoyed my stay in Hefei was attending English Corner at the various university campuses near my school. For those who haven’t taught English in China, English Corner is basically an open club that meets regularly and welcomes any student who wants to come in and practice English.

Some schools require their own foreign teachers to coordinate English Corner, while others have some student officers who organize topics of discussion, and others are just freeform “show up and chat” events. I first attended one of the latter, which turned out to be one of the biggest in the district, and I met enough people from other schools that I soon found myself regularly attending four different English Corners in the area.

Chatting with the university students was just what I needed, since my own students were too young to hang out with and I’d only see my school’s teachers at mealtimes since they were worked nearly to death (early morning exercises, classes morning, afternoon, and evening, and even student shower monitor duty some days of the week). Some of my English Corner friends would even buy me dinner at their school cafeterias occasionally, which was where I first encountered the spicy soup called malatang, which I enjoy to this day.

I would very occasionally run into the foreign teachers employed at those schools, who were often surprised that I would attend willingly. A few years later, English Corner would indeed lose its luster for me, but at the time, a shy, self-conscious kid like myself was positively basking in the attention I received from all these students, which in turn increased my self-confidence as a teacher.

Jim left the school after a year, and working there started to wear thin as my third semester dragged on. I wasn’t ready to leave China and English teaching, though, so after a year and a half in Hefei I made up my mind to call up CIEE to ask for a university to teach at in the fall.

If I thought Hefei had changed my life by giving me my first in-depth exposure to China, I had no idea what lay in store for me at my next post in Nanchang…