I'm filling in some teaching hours for a friend who has gone to Korea for Christmas. I teach three young Korean teenagers whose English is... uncertain. They start class at 8am and continue until 9pm. I teach them for four hours every week from a set of textbooks that I wouldn't give a native speaking teenager. The texts are on impossibly boring and complex subjects for 13 year-olds. Today we had a text on the appointment of a new dean in a university and another on global warming. Next week is on early crank cameras. Both were complex English. They are so tired and bored they spend their time either face down on their desks or rubbing their faces.
I feel like I'm complicit in child abuse for making them study such rubbish.
I should be playing English games with them and studying texts with some relevance. Not one whose given reason for global warming was that "car exhausts are hot and this extra heat is trapped by the atmosphere and causes global warming". When I spoke to the boy about his electric guitar and band I finally got some sort of English learning going on, rather than regurgitating random bits of text. But no, out comes the textbook... And their vocab lists they have to study. They have about 60 words a week to learn, but they just learn random words with no context. One last week was "Puritan". I asked the boy what that meant and he said "errr... someone who believes in God?".
Plus I realised today that there is CCTV in the classroom. I hadn't known this.
Still it is a very easy job, despite the guilt at being forced to do a rubbish job. Plus I get paid every week so that was 5 crisp red be-Maoed 100yuan notes in my hand today. Love ya Mao.
I had another erhu lesson today. There was an awkward moment when my teacher began to suspect that I was just nodding my head regardless of whether I understood and that I, in fact, didn't understand very much at all. Which is only half true...
I also tried to explain to my oral teacher that whilst tuition fees in England are now £9000 it's not quite as simple as that. However my Chinese, so fluent when buying a jin (500g) of apples, couldn't quite handle loan repayments, salary thresholds and interests rates tied to inflation so I ended up mumbling to a halt with smoke coming out of my ears...
My vpn, which I use to slip through the Great Firewall, sometimes slows the internet down so I tried to write this blog without it and discovered this site is also blocked. Why, China, why.
On the way to work today they were unblocking a sewer. I never want to be near a being-deblocked sewer ever again.
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