Where I work and live

This is a (possibly painfully) long post about my teaching jobs and apartment here. I hope it’ll be of some interest to you, but who knows.

Work
I have three jobs. I work sixteen hours a week with the equivalent of high school juniors at the Changchun Foreign Language School, a junior and senior high school with about three thousand (!) students. The school has academic buildings, dorms, and a large track the kids use during recesses. I don’t know how many of the students live in the dorms, but after (very unscientifically) polling my classes it seems that the majority of them live at home. The kids that do live in the dorms don’t like it very much – the most common complaints are about the food and the dorms being uncomfortably cold in winter.

I eat lunch in the school cafeteria every day. The quality of the food ranges from good to mediocre (a New Zelander I work with describes the food as typically “look[ing] like a dog’s breakfast”), but it’s so cheap (¥3, about US$.36) and filling that I can’t say no to it. To the left is a photo of one of our lunches. Usually they aren’t this extravagant, and I was actually lucky to get the back end of the fish – almost everyone else had been served fish heads.
Since I’ve been here I’ve been very impressed with the hours the students put in at school. They show up at 7 AM and have classes until 7 PM. From 7-10 PM there are study sessions (mandatory for the dorm students, optional for all others) in the classrooms. There are no study sessions Friday nights, but there are on Sunday nights. Saturday mornings (from 7 until about 1 PM, I think) there are classes, so the kids really only have a 1-1/2 day weekend. And what little weekend they have doesn’t have much free time; most of the students have English, math, or music lessons on Saturday afternoon and/or Sunday morning.

The situation at school isn’t one where students merely show up and twiddle their thumbs, either. Their work load is intense. At my school the students take ten subjects, and have an amazing amount of homework. One student I talked to said, “If anyone says that they’ve finished all their homework, they’re lying.”

I am told that the point of all this hard work, which starts early in grade school, is to be able to do well on standardized tests and be accepted (sequentially) into a good junior high, high school, and university. A student told me that, “In China it is the opposite of the United States. Primary school and high school are very hard here, but university is easy.” With the focus and study skills they’ve learned in their K-12 education, it’s no wonder that university might seem so easy.

Apart from working at the high school, I teach two afternoon weekend classes out of my main office. My kids there range in age from 5-9, are very cute, and we get along great. (Five isn’t the youngest age at which kids start learning English; a teacher at my office has a 15-month old in one of her English classes who, as she pointed out, “Doesn’t even speak Chinese!”)

My weekend gig is only four hours long, so it’s pretty fun. We work out of our textbook (learning vocabulary, sentence structures, and reading dialogues), sing songs, and play (nominally) educational games. The only bad thing about the weekend classes is how tired the kids can be. Many of them have had to go to school in the morning or have gone to private tutoring in math or music lessons.

The last two hours (my contract is for a 22-hr work week) of the week are spent at a grade school teaching first graders. They speak no English at all (and their teachers speak very little), so my highly acclaimed pantomiming skills are getting a workout.

Sunday is my day off, and on it I try to do as little talking as humanly possible. Bad for language acquisition, good for my throat. Once I get a little bit more Chinese under my belt (I figure I really should know all my numbers from 1-10 before I start traveling on my own), I’ll start taking day trips leaving Saturday night after classes and getting back Sunday evening.

Living
I live at my high school in a one bedroom apartment in the foreign language teacher dorms. The accommodations are really nice by Chinese standards (a large living room and bedroom, western toilet, running water on demand, radiators, large windows, and a washing machine), and I appreciate them very much. The only downside is that since it is on-campus there are rather restrictive rules; guests must leave by 10 PM, no overnight guests without permission, and (most inconveniently) a 10 PM curfew. There is a 24 hour doorman (which is great in terms of security) who locks up at 10, and woe be unto the drunk who wakes him up at 1 AM to get let in.

When I first got to China I lived in a temporary apartment for about a week. It was in a very nice location (next to a daoist temple and right in downtown Changchun), but wasn’t the nicest place to live. There was only running water for three hours/day (7:30-8:30 AM and 5-7 PM), so I had to do lots of complicated planning for tasks we usually take for granted like showering, brushing my teeth, and flushing the toilet. During that week I almost broke down and bought an expensive gym membership so I could shave, shower, and…go to the bathroom whenever I wanted, but my cheap nature convinced me to tough it out. I did, and now I appreciate on-demand running water all the more.

In my bathroom is a tiny washing machine (which works fine) and a spin dryer that basically gets enough water off your clothes that you can then put them on the clothesline without them dripping all over the floor. The clothes line is out in the hall in front of a window that overlooks campus, so I’m glad I only brought conservative underwear. (Actually, I’ve only noticed my underwear hanging in the window; maybe the other residents of my dorm have figured out a more hidden way to dry their personal items. I should look into this.)

I have a pretty nice kitchen with a two burner gas range, fridge, granite counters, and on-demand hot water. I haven’t done much (OK, any) cooking since I’ve gotten here since it’s so affordable to eat out.