haha this is hutan school- i love it! out of all the schools i've worked at, they have the most fun music and dance routine for their mid-morning exercises. it reminds me of like ABBA or something. those poor boys in the front are so off sync with each other though hahah.

i've only been working in hutan for a semester but it's been great there. as you can see, it's SMALL! there's not that many kids there- i teach 4 classes of 6th graders with about 25 kids in each class. compare that to another school i work in right down the road with has 8 classes of 5th graders with 40-50 kids in each class. the funny thing is though that all the parents around here want their kids to go to that big school down the road because apparently it is famous in dalian. too bad the learning environment at little hutan is 10 times better than at the famous school (this is not just related to the class sizes, but i can't get into it right now haha). one of my private students goes to hutan and i try to tell him and his family how lucky he is, but they probably don't understand my perspective. on the other hand, my other private student goes to the big school and i tell her parents that they need to get her out of there haha. she can't even speak any english, she has been drowned out in the crowd! this is a picture of hutan. look, the kids have room to breathe!

this on the other hand, is the big school. it's like claustrophobia up in here. out of my 13 classes at this crap school, i only have 3 that are well-behaved, and this is one of them. you can imagine though with this many kids, if discipline just isn't the classes' thing, it can be chaos.

in a short time i've made really good friends with one of the english teachers at hutan- angela. she's wonderful! her english is rockin' too. you would think that this should be a given for an english teacher, but trust me it's not! she told me that she doesn't have a college degree so i'm not exactly sure how she was able to get a teaching position, perhaps that's why she is at a little school like hutan. on the other hand, i know she thinks that many things are unfair in chinese society, such as the income gap, so i feel that is another reason that she is there- the kids aren't so rich at hutan. she didn't come right out and say but she hinted that she gave my private student a harder time than some of the other children there because his family is so well off in comparison to some other kid's families here.


here is a picture of angela HELPING ME. this is not something to be taken for granted here at all- this is the only school where i have help in my classes. unfortunately for me though, i need the least amount of help at hutan because the kids are so good but i'll let her do her thing anyhow! she usually is just making sure that they understand what i'm telling them to do. what i like about her is that she really cares about the classes and the students.

they do this thing in dalian sometimes where all the teachers go to different schools to observe classes and be observed. last week a bunch of the chinese english teachers were at the big famous school. i was sitting in the office minding my own business (the atmosphere in the english office there is terrible- i've been there for 2 semesters and haven't made so much as an acquaintance there), and angela burst into the office to say hi because she knows i also teach there. i was quite happy that she did that- i really think making no friends at the big school has been a missed opportunity for both me and for those teachers and i want them to be aware of that. i noticed that one of them in particular was observing the interaction and she actually addressed me later. i didn't quite give her the cold shoulder, but look, i've been at that school for 7 months now and i'm leaving next month, the fact is that it's too late now to be friends. honestly though i was just bewildered that she was talking to me.

back to angela, i feel like some of her ideas have relaxed a lot more since i started teaching there. at first, she was very on top of the kids about their grammar, and was surprised when we did a story writing exercise one time and i didn't want to make any corrections. i understand her position though- these kids are very heavily tested on how perfectly they can write english. at any rate, now in my class, i heard her tell the kids that it was okay to make a mistake!! i think that was probably her idea anyhow, but it often seems like what people must say and do in china is not what they actually believe. there's so much outside pressure that i probably don't even understand...but honestly, the kids are taught that making mistakes is not okay, and that every question has exactly one answer. i've seen some of my kid's english tests, and they may answer a question in a grammatically correct way but if it's not the way they were taught to answer it in the book it will be marked wrong. oh my god!!!