Thank god it's over!!!! (Marcus)

Well day 1 of teaching has come and gone and as the title of this post says..thank god! The anticipation of getting back in there in front of 55ish kids is just hardcore! We were both nervous as hell again - something we haven't really felt since we first arrived here and were truly dropped in the deep end of teaching.

It had been around 2 months since we have taught properly - long enough to almost completely forget how it was, long enough to take you back to square one. Walking into that classroom today took me right back to the start, BUT...this time round we had the leg up on the children.

Why?

Well today was their first day of school proper. Yeah they have been here prior, doing their cadet marching and various other classroom style things, but today was the start of the actual semester. These kids are new to this campus and their class make-ups are likewise, new. Of course there'll be new friends and so on in there, but not the clusters of 'cool kids' like we had when we first started here.

When we first started teaching, we were the newcomers. Not just to the school - it being the middle of their school year, but to the teaching role period. With absolutely no training we had to step in front of these classes of kids who had already had half a year to get to know each other and somehow still appear confident!

So while today was nerve-wracking, it only took around 2-3 minutes tops to settle down and get into things. The kids were all bright-eyed and attentive and their english was surprisingly better than we expected. These are possibly from a younger age-group than the ones previous(well they would be) and possibly started learning english a good year or two earlier.

There have been changes in Chinese schooling over the past few years in that students are by and large starting to learn english from a younger age. It is possible these new students are from that line - or it's possible these classes today were just flukey good! Either way, it is so good to get the first day over and done with. It's like day one of any job - the worst day.

I only had one class today to Courtney's two. Tomorrow we both have three, yay! At least the weather has cooled quite considerably.

And on that note - yes, it came the end of August/start of September and there's been literally an almost 10-15 degree change in the weather. It's now actually very pleasant. There is still a degree of humidity but it is much much much better. Our summer of hellish weather is thankfully over.

In China, today is day 1 of Autumn, whilst in Australia it's day 1 of Spring. We are happy that when we return home in early October, it will be just starting to warm up for us...ah sometimes you can win em all.