A day in the life of a TEFL teacher in China

Our intern Dave gives some insight into a typical day teaching English at his school in rural China.

So I mentioned my typical day of galavanting through a maze of roads and streets on every form of transport I can find. After having finally set my penny-farthing up against a tree that’s been half painted white for no reason, I finally arrived back in my school. So I’ve decided to talk about a typical day of school for me at the tail end of the teaching experience, how has it changed, is it easier?

Every morning is much the same, I still wake up with the early morning scream of horror, but that’s a lot more to do with mornings in general, and nothing to do with the job. Due to a lot of students changing schools and things, there has a been a major shift in the time table allowing me to work most of my time in 3 days leaving me with a glorious 4 days off a week that more than makes up for the trek into and out’ve central Beijing, seeing as I now have 2 weekends.

If I have the willpower, which is becoming more frequent but wouldn’t be described by anyone as frequent, I get up around 6.30am and I wander around zombie-like in a strange and confused daze that results in me going to a dining hall with a silver bowl (silver in colour, I’m not a Pirate) to put 3 eggs and a healthy dose of vegetables into it. They also offer a strange heated bag of milk and a slice of bread that looks like pizza with all the stuff fallen off. In the morning I force myself to eat eggs and some mixed spicy vegetables, which is hard because in the morning I am used to eating nothing less bland than air, water and paper. This Chinese school thinks it’s ok to put chilli peppers in your breakfast vegetables, which is a shock at first, but it doesn’t half wake you up. Also you’d be surprised how fast you lose weight eating eggs and chilli instead of toast in the morning.

There is a certain amount of ‘keep on keeping on’ with everyone at this time of year, people drifting between classes like leaves into and out’ve a corridor, teaching kids who just want to play video games. Except in my case, where we both just want to play video games so I teach them about video games in english. Borderlands and the like, they have a major love for Starcraft and League of Legends over here, and if you like DOTA you are nothing more than scum. One of my students for some reason, that I imagine is both parental and fiscal, has somehow convinced the teachers that it is ok to turn the class room that he normally spends time in, into a bedless bedroom. Fully furnished with an Ikea cabinet which is full of anime and manga figurines which has a strange way of relaxing the room.

I have managed to procure some Mandarin lessons out’ve the teachers here so my mandarin has improved exponentially to a point where I still don’t understand anything but I’m much more frustrated and annoyed. It’s a glorious skill to have.

The end of the day has become a ritual of me running away as far as possible to a restaurant that serves food that isn’t reminiscent of the weird blue clay the Detrassi, or whatever they are called, serve the Vogons at the start of the HitchHikers guide to the galaxy tv show.   Don’t get me wrong this isn’t a disparaging snipe at Chinese food, it’s just a disparaging snipe at Chinese school dinners.

Five months of this and I’m pretty happy to have done it, I will give a proper run down of my overall experience in approximately two blogs time, but its also amazing that it’s almost time to go, last January seems like decades ago. As per usual I encourage you to do this if the smallest part of you feels you might enjoy it, because depending on how you spend your time, the smallest part of you will enjoy it.