Making Connections, Marking Tests and Writing Exams

This has been a fairly long week. Admittedly the piss up on Wednesday night to celebrate the election win for Obama didn’t really help matters.

I’m still really enjoying the teaching though am finding it hard to make a good connection with one of my classes. The other class I teach is great and we can have a laugh and a joke, but this class is just dead. Having never taught before I don’t have any well practised tricks up my sleeve to turn the situation around and without verbal feedback from the students it’s hard to know how well I’m doing as a teacher.

In a week or so’s time the University will be asking the students for feedback on us so they can decide whether to extend our contracts or not. I’ve got my fingerscrossed.

As for this weekend, I need to mark 28 reading and vocabulary test papers, 30 creative writing stories, write a pre-mid term test and the mid-term exam paper for grammar and writing. Thankfully next week should be fairly straight forward as after the tests I’ll be helping them revise for the mid-terms.

The Mid-term week, the week after next, means no classes so for the first 3 days we just need to invigilate a few exams, but the thursday and friday will be marking time. Hopefully by then we’ll know if we’ll be staying another term or not.

Beijing Beijing, kinda

Well we made it back to China.

Brief worries at Bangkok airport when the check-in staff ummed and arred over our work visas and made us sign a waiver to say if we’re refused entry to China the airline (Sri Lankan) won’t take us back to Thailand for free.

We were picked up at the airport by staff from the school (NCIST: North China Institute of Science and Technology) who took us back to the campus and our flat for the next 4 months.

Technically the school is not in Beijing but just inside the neighbouring province of Hebei but apparently just a 39 minute bus ride from Beijing center. We’ll find out more about that journey when we go into Beijing this weekend.

As we approached the flat it looked like a pretty run down 1960′s block but once we got inside we were relieved to see that whilst little had been improved on the outside the flat itself was fairly modern.

We spent the last few days shopping for essentials and cleaning the flat. Now we’ve unpacked it’s starting to feel a bit more like home.

Teaching starts next week, for now we’re just relaxing and settling in.