It Begins!

I wanted to take a minute to let everyone know that the long-awaited event has finally arrived. I'm now teaching classes at my new school, Mastermind English. I have one class of students aged 6-9 and another class that has students from teenager to adult. The classes are going quite well, I think, though I still don't have a teacher's book for the adult class. Nevertheless, the children's class is going well. The kids are getting adjusted to a teacher that doesn't let them just do anything. (Chinese kids are terribly spoiled by their parents and, subsequently, by their teachers.) Surprisingly, though, it doesn't take much discipline to set them behaving fairly well in class. Education at this age also focuses much more on games and songs than a 'lesson' presented formally. Last week we began by learning the alphabet and had our first test on introducing yourself and learning the words for common toys. All of the kids did well and a couple had perfect scores. I can only hope the adult class, which has just started, will do as well as the kids have.

We have two classes for each of these groups on the weekend and that part of the work day is over by lunch. After lunch we head over to a music school where we do demonstration classes for some of the students there. The idea is that if parents have the money and inclination to have their kids do extra curricular music lessons, then they might also want their kids to take extra curricular English lessons, which is what our school offers. The same applies to karate lessons, dance lessons, etc., which are all located in the same building in town. That's usually a good place to recruit students. And then there's Darcy.

I don't know if I've mentioned that school in previous posts, but in short, it's the school where almost all the foreigners work in Chenzhou. While most schools have difficulty in securing one foreign teacher, Darcy has nearly a dozen. They spend a lot of money on getting foreign teachers and, in my opinion, their teaching supplies suffer. I think a lot of the kids walk away from Darcy classes without a grasp on how to speak or use English. I think our school, if it is managed properly, will end up taking a lot of students away from Darcy.

That makes things awkward, however, since most of my friends in town work at Darcy. This process will take years though, so I'm not terribly worried about it now. I imagine that most of my friends will be long gone before Mastermind provides any real competition for Darcy. Darcy is well established in Chenzhou, with three schools and a kindergarten, as well as schools in two other cities.

Right now, we're only really worried about getting ourselves established and running with a couple hundred students. Currently we have ten.