I Should've Gone to English Corner...

My first couple of weeks of teaching are in the books, and it's gone better than I had thought it would. My students are incredibly nice and very anxious to learn. I teach seven classes a week; 3 on Wednesday, 3 on Friday, and 1 on Saturday morning. I spend about 11 hours a week in the classroom, so as you can tell life is still rough for me over here in China. I can hardly handle all the pressure that is on me. Even my body is falling apart from it all. If you didn't catch that, I was only kidding. Well except about my body falling apart. Read more to find out about that. Fantastic story. Anyway, I have an extremely limited amount of pressure on me. Really, if pressure were measure on a scale from 6-26 (6 being the lowest amount of pressure), I would be around a 7. Yeah, my job is pretty kick-ass. I see most of my students only once a week, but I do have one class I see twice a week. Those students are employees of a local chemical company, so their age range is between 22-27. Their English is ok, so it is a little more difficult to get them to understand some thing. We're making progress though, slowly but surely. My other classes are first-year students, and some are with third-year students. They all seem pretty excited to have an American as their English teacher, so let's hope that excitement lasts all year long. My first meeting with all my classes I just did introductions. I showed them pictures of family and my house. They enjoyed those very much. They thought Kristin (my sister-in-law) was my girlfriend, so when I told them she was my brother's wife they seemed a little disappointed. Oh well, can't win them all. They asked me many questions about why I came to China and what I thought of it so far. They also asked me if I like Chinese girls, to which I replied,"The Chinese people have been very kind to me so far. They have also been super helpful." Question successfully avoided. My second class I taught them about some American music. We talked about different genres and different artists. I even was able to play some songs for them, which they enjoyed for the most part. Gold Digger by Kanye West, however, was not one of their favorites. I did explain what a "gold digger" was, so at least they learned something from the lesson. They really run a tight ship around here. My employee class is the only class that actually has some sort of textbook, but it sucks so I barely teach out of it. My students tell me what they want to learn and I come up with lessons based on that. I will do some lessons about business because some of their majors are business English. They want to learn a lot about America and how people live so that will be quite fun to teach them those things.

Now the story about my body breaking down. I broke my foot. My left foot to be exact. The outside of my left foot to be even more exact. I lied. It's more of a fracture than a break, but it still hurts. As some of you know, I had surgery almost two years ago on my right foot for a stress fracture on the outside of my foot. Well, my left foot had started to feel similar for the last few weeks to how my right foot felt. Then, I was playing basketball on Thursday night and made a cut to go left and felt my bone crack. Since my pain tolerance is so high, I could barely feel it. No, but seriously, it hurt like something that hurts really bad. I knew it was broke right then (just like I knew my ankle/wrist/foot/arm/stomach had been broken/messed up in my past). I've had too many x-rays to count in my past, and very very seldom have had anything too seriously wrong with. One stress fracture out of countless x-rays. I was really hoping I was right about this one. I know that sounds bad, but if I was a baseball player I would have already been demoted to Triple A. By me having an x-ray and something actually being wrong with me puts my break-percentage up quite a few points. Fritz, kindly enough, took me on my mo-ped to the hospital and I got a cast put on and also got some quite comfortable crutches. Really, though, they suck. Big time. Especially because I live on the 4th floor. Things could be worse. Now to explain the title of this post. I was asked earlier that day to go to the campus where I teach (which is 40 minutes there and 35 minutes back) to partake in something called English corner. This is where I just stand around and talk to students for a couple of hours. I agreed, but later decided I really didn't want to go because I would be there late and had to go back there early the next morning to teach. I then called my boss lady back and made up and excuse as to why I could no longer go. I think someone had a birthday party if I remember correctly. Then I broke my foot. I should've gone to English corner...

Pre-broken foot I was able to do some hiking and rock climbing around Guilin. The pictures in this post are from earlier in the week. The mountain we climbed was quite high, and the view from the top was pretty remarkable. Guilin really is a beautiful city. Sitting at the top of this mountain really made me appreciate this opportunity I've been given. It also helps to remind me to take the time to take everything in and be thankful for all I have. Although me breaking my foot takes away many things I love to do (namely playing sports) away, I know that I still have it pretty dang good. For that, I am thankful.

I hope this post finds you all well. I miss you all very much. I love hearing from you guys. Don't be afraid to email me or message me on here to let me know how you are doing and what's new in all of your lives. Life is good!


-Kevin


P.S. Big win for Mizzou today. Hopefully the Chiefs can get back to winning tomorrow.