A Successful First Week in Dalian

I could not ask for a more beautiful, Friday morning in Dalian.  The blue skies are out, I aced my first exam, and I have a great weekend ahead of me.  

Nothing better than a blue sky day in China!  Dalian has more than other places in China, but not near as many as South Carolina!

Before I get into the plans for the weekend, I want to talk a little about our experience yesterday teaching at the local high school.  The high school that we taught at has over 3,000 kids in attendance, and is called The Senior Middle School Attached to Dalian University of Technology.  What an experience.  We arrived at the school at around 3 o’clock and went and sat down in a classroom to wait for the kids to finish up doing whatever it was that they were doing.  We then proceeded to go outside and take pictures with the president of the school and some of the highly regarded students at the senior middle school.  After about ten pictures, Caitlin and I (my partner) got paired up with three students from the school who would be leading us to their class to teach.  I thought to myself, “If the class is going to be anything like these three students, we are in for a great time!”  

We arrived at the fourth floor of one of the buildings, took a right down the hallway, and then walked into a completely full classroom of fifty students!  All of the students applauded when we walked in the room.  We would be the teacher for the day.

At first, Caitlin and I were pretty nervous about talking in front of this many students, but the wimpy attitudes soon wore off after we began to talk.  For the first twenty or so minutes, we talked about what schooling is like in America.  We explained the basics of the school system, and then went deeper into what our high school experience consisted of.   We explained the length we went to school, how much we studied, what we did outside of school, and what we did on the weekends.  All pretty basic concepts, but WAY different from how these kids experience school.

The kids at this school, and most schools in China, have much competition in high school.  There is no time for anything other than studying.  From 7:00 in the morning to 7:00 at night, these kids are in school, studying and memorizing countless ideas.  When it is time to go home, there is also studying to be done.  So, any type of sport played, at least for this school, is probably done during the school day.  I’m not too sure how much free time they get during their 12 hour stay at school, but we did see many people outside playing basketball, volleyball, and soccer in this big concrete playground.  This is most likely when an organized sport is practiced.

During the class that consisted of about 50 minutes of talking, we tried our hardest to ask the students about what high school is like in China, and about what they wanted to know about life in America.  Our class was too cool for school.  Most people, I could tell, did not want to be in school any longer.  A class period with Americans coming to talk meant a class period to sit, relax, and do nothing.  Thankfully, the three students that brought us up to the classroom had many questions and were really interested in America.  I don’t know what we would have done without these three students.  Thankfully, I brought a PowerPoint slide of pictures to show them towards the end of the class when we started to run out of things to talk about.  From what I hear from my fellow study abroaders, we had a dud class.  Maybe it was our teaching style.  Maybe our class wasn’t as advanced in English.  Who knows…

After class, we headed outside to play some basketball! I’m not sure how this happened, but we ended up playing the girls high school team.  It was so much fun!  None of us were prepared, and none of us play basketball, so it wasn’t too bad of a match up. However, we definitely gave them a lot of practice.  My height against their height was a huge benefit ha.  I packed about 10 balls during the 30 minute game haha.  We all had a ton of fun and took lots of pictures with a bunch of random students afterwards.  They must think I’m the next Yao Ming!  

The entire high school experience was priceless.  A majority of the kids enjoyed having us there and genuinely appreciated us coming.  I can talk more about some of what I took away from this and what I learned about the Chinese school system, but I’ll save that for someone who is interested.  I know some people might not be as book-smart in the United States as these kids, but I have a lot more appreciation now for how we are taught in America.  The ability to pursue extracurricular activities and have free time to think on your own is invaluable. 

The test at the beginning of the day today was part verbal test, part written test.  The verbal part of the test was a bit stressful, as I have never had to take a verbal test.  We all had to be extremely prepared for this part of the test.  It would be terrible to be asked a question by the professor and not have a clue as to how to answer it.  We all did great.  The written test was a breeze.  I am much more a visual person than verbal, so seeing the words on the page and having time to think about the question was simple compared to hearing a question and having to answer it instantly.   

We will be heading out to the beach in a couple of minutes, so I need to end this blog here.  How nice it is to be on the weekend in a foreign country like China!  So much to explore!