Possibly volume one.
Things are going very well! I'm pretty thrilled, at this point. I'm over the whole "oh no i'm in china" bit. Still a little homesick, still miss people, but i'm a lot more at ease with my surroundings at least. My apartment feels more like a home now, y'know? Of course you know. Anyways, so that's good. Further, I have had waaay harder jobs. My last entry was a little confusing, so let me break it down.
This semester, I have 19 weeks of work. Each week, i prepare 2 lessons, and give 8 classes, each class is 2 hours long. The first lesson is to teach about major western cultures on monday, but the book they gave us is really good so basically hour 1 is reading from the book and hour 2 i have to come up with something on my own. Not too hard, there are really good ideas online. The other lesson, which i teach tuesday through thursday, is Oral english. This is a little harder. The book is complete garbage, and boring as hell, but "oral english" is such a vague descriptor that playing charades is a viable lesson. So, in all, my work all week consists of coming up with lessons on the weekend, and 24 hours a week of transportation and teaching time. At a stretch, a 26 or 28 hour work week, for pay that, frankly, thrusts me into the upper middle class of China for a year. Most of the teaching time is just teaching the same lesson over and over, which is a bit dull, but certainly not hard labor.
The guys I work with are alright. I've been spending some time with Grant, because he also plays videogames, which is a great way to burn time until I get my first paycheck advance and have enough money to hire a chinese language tutor, get internet, get a phone and a cell phone, etc etc. I've been playing CRAAAZY amounts of Baldur's gate, and i'm very close to getting a wattage converter so i can play xbox too. Grant did this gig last year, and he teaches the same class, so he's been really helpful in getting my feet on the ground, teaching wise. Mike, however, has been doing this stuff for years. Kind of acts like an older brother all the time, it's hard to draw a bead on the guy. Still, he's friendly enough, and in a situation like this you stick by who speaks your language.
My students are all pretty decent folk. A lot of them look bored out of their gourd pretty much the full 2 hours, but some of them are really engaged. It's hard to be entertaining all the time, y'know?
Hrm. My internet cafe thing just sent me a red flag. Gonna post this, part two will start momentarily.
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