Tuesday 1st September - First Day At School

So today was my first day at school! I am teaching at a primary school called Dr Catherine F. Woo Memorial School in a place called City One. I got up ridiculously early (even for me!) and headed out the door for the station. On my way to the mtr station, there was bamboo baskets filled with beansprouts delivered to the market and, I passed through the food market, where it was clearly meat preparation time- as I passed through, pigs heads and entire pigs were lying quartered open - it was quite a surreal way to start your morning commute!
The signs on the mtr are so funny sometimes, you sometimes feel a little like you are in 1984 esque, with tannoy notices like always hold the handrail and, if you sneeze, you must use a tissue and then make sure you put it straight away in the bin! And later, don’t spit on the platform or into the bins. All are precautions for the H1N1 swine flu (at my school, they don’t have all the students in the same place at any one time, as a swine flu precaution and they take the children’s temperature as they enter the school) However, even without the swine flu precautions, the Hong Kong Chinese are pretty keen on their hygiene and cleanliness. There are many people wearing surgical masks on the mtr and around the streets and one of the schools we trained at, the children all wore them, which was a bit of a nightmare, trying to play Chinese whispers with them – needless to say they didn’t manage to get the right word round the circle!)
The welcome assembly at my school was nice. All the teachers were called up and introduced and bowing to the students. They are so respectful to each other here, with one half of the assembly bowing to each other out of respect for fellow pupils.
Also, the whole system is so structured, with all the classes in extremely straight lines as I entered, boys in one line, girls in the other, and their bags, lined up beside, in a third line, all facing the same way in a perfectly straight line, even at the P1 which was amazing to see and far removed from any school I had seen at home.
However, by 8am we had had 2 nose bleeds and one boy collapse, due to the heat of standing up and I assume the stress and anxiety of the first day of school. Apparently, it is not uncommon for this to happen, especially after the summer holidays when they are not used to standing up for so long and also the heat, even at half 7am (yes that’s what time we start at!) was quite intense even with many fans on full blast.
The children here are always extremely well presented, their uniforms are always beautifully neat and tidy, even at the youngest years. The girls wear a lovely tartan high waisted skirt and a tartan bow tied ribbon as a tie and a white shirt and the boys are in blue shorts, white shirt and a tartan trim collar and shirt sleeves.
After the drama of the morning assembly, the day passed very smoothly. I have a desk in the staff room, opposite to amazing Martin who is a whiz at IT and so does not have far to come, poor man, when I have changed my typing in to Chinese characters again or can’t turn it on because I have not plugged it in…I bet he is looking for a new desk as I write this..! I went to one class with Cecily, where I played some games with the students. I was extremely humbled when a boy came up to draw a word for hangman and it ensued that this word did not have any vowels as the class were guessing letters. I was ready to take the chalk off him and was mentally telling myself that hangman was too advanced for this class, when it transpired the word was rhythm…! It appears more and more that I will be learning much more than I will be teaching this year.

Monday 17th August - Thursday 28th August 2009 - Orientation & training

Monday saw the beginning of a two week orientation program and primary school training where we were split off in to our separate teaching groups of primary, secondary and post secondary. The training was exhausting but it gave us a pretty comprehensive insight in to the type of things we will be expected to do during the course of our year on the program.The insight in to teaching, the information and the resources given to us, by Chatteris during these two weeks were invaluable and, after each day, I felt that each day I had acquired so many more tools in order to get these children to have fun and speak English whilst still feeling there is so much more to know and still not yet ready to go out on our own. However, there is so much space for creativity, initiative, and your own unique ideas whilst teaching that it seems to almost require you to not just deliver lessons but almost give something of yourself to it, in order to get the most back, whilst also be willing to constantly learn and improve and open minded to learn how other – quite the challenge but one which I am sure every teacher been through to some extent.

Since every lesson we teach needs to be begun with a ‘warm up or energiser’, our orientation was largely taken up by being taught, and teaching others a huge amount of childrens games and songs, and had us all running around, crouching, jumping, shouting, dancing, singing and acting so much that I felt as though I was about 7 years old again myself! - in fact I don’t think I even played this many when I was a child. The music and drama day saw us in wigs, sunglasses and capes, when we performed an extra special rendition of the three little pigs for a P3 class before designing in groups our own ‘harry potter the handsome pig!’.

We did in fact do some work! The rest of the days were spent designing, planning and teaching a lesson with a partner along different themes and also participating in others lessons. We finished the day exhausted, having given so much energy in to our lessons and wilting from the heat and humidity of the mid afternoon!

The children themselves are wonderful. They are very sweet, extremely polite and on the whole very well behaved. They all give themselves English names and so you get some slightly strange names, many like betty, conny, candy, sandy, cherry, and then thoers I have heard like bread, and messy. Apparantly, it is quite common to change your name, which people do a lot depending on films they had seen or celebrities they admire! They also work extremely hard and are under quite a lot of pressure to perform well and get 100%. They stand up when answering questions and are almost too receptive to signals telling them to be quiet. They are also quite shy and lacking in confidence to speak in front of the class and although they have many English lessons a week, they are very unwilling to speak it and lack the tools to speak it socially and conversationally., not wanting to get it wrong, which is obviously where organisations like Chatteris step in. However, in so many ways, it reminded me of the I guess, near universal feeling of learning a foreign language where you do not want to speak if you are not completely sure, in case you are wrong or you get the accent or pronunciation wrong. I remember sitting in many a French conversation lesson and trying to avoid eye contact with the language assistant so I did not have to say anything or not wanting to answer the questions!

In the middle of our training, all of us joined together to put on an English funfair for all the children we had been working with. Most of us will have to organise whole school English events and funfairs are a popular option so it was very useful albeit quite daunting, to see the time, energy and resources that went in to the setting up and the smooth running of the event! Testament to this was the fact that Hannah, the girl organising the whole thing, walked round with a headset on the whole time! It was quite a feat to organise the whole thing, as the covered playground was transformed in to rows of games and stalls, which we had to man as well as looking after our assigned group. Taylor and I ran the shooting game and, as you can guess, we were swarmed with boys of all ages, who were desperate to get their hands on the different sizes of plastic guns and shoot the rubber pellets at the pictures of English words. They were supposed to answer a question to which the answer was a picture to shoot at although the spoken English to shooting ratio could have been better! At least they had fun! We frequently had to herd them back as they crowded practically on top of the pictures to shoot them. A surprising number of girls, came to play although were far more sensible and nearly always refused the larger guns, wanting only to use the smaller pistol, the opposite to the boys!

That evening., we all went out to celebrate in LKF, at central on the Island where I was lucky enough to see a friend from home whose family lives out here, who was out celebrating her birthday which made my night extra lovely!
After having listened to western music and danced, we came back in a taxi about 3am, and as we came out from under the cross harbour tunnel, we drove through this road full to the brim of offloaded fruit especially oranges, boxes and boxes were piled all the way along the road obviously ready to be distributed across Kowloon.