First Day of Class

Yes, today was my first day as a college English teacher. It was quite exciting and typically Chinese. When I woke up at 6am, the freshmen students were congregating around two large (loud) buses just beneath my apartment window. The process of loading the buses involved a good deal of talking and shouting. Just about the time the buses pulled out, the 6:30am announcements blared over the loudspeakers. I don’t know if I mentioned, but we are very close to the loudspeaker, and three times a day they play news, announcements, and an interesting variety of music. In the past few days I have heard Dido and “Moon River,” as well as popular Chinese songs. Strange. Anyway, I left my apartment at about 7:15am to take the city bus to Guang Ling, the campus where my classes were.

I was a little bit nervous about finding the classroom, but I had come by to visit on Saturday and found where I was supposed to go. The school called Sunday afternoon to tell me that the class would be in a different room than originally planned. I arrived at Guang Ling around 7:40am, still with plenty of time to get ready for my 8am class, right? That’s how it would work in a perfect world, but this morning I walked into the new classroom and found a Chinese professor preparing to teach his class.

And so began the morning’s Great Scavenger Hunt. I went to the classroom where the class was originally going to be, but no luck there either. I asked students, looked into every classroom nearby, then all the classrooms on several different floors. A kindly professor attempted to help me and decided I needed to be in a different building. So I walked to another building and explored the floors there with no success. A student helper took me through several different buildings. I finally found the class – after about 30 minutes of wandering around all floors of three different classroom buildings with various students and professors. I got to class about 20 minutes late, out of breath and sweaty – not exactly the start I was hoping for. But what can you do? I apologized, tried to explain the confusion, rearranged my entire lesson plan, and I guess it all worked out in the end. I decided, in the midst of the crazy confusion, that there was nothing I could do about it and nothing I really could have done to avoid it, so I might as well laugh. It was either that or risk heart failure. "Such is China," and you just have to expect the unpredictable. I would say that China is not for the inflexible or those with high blood pressure.