I’m home. I have been here for about a week getting settled and exploring all the new changes around the school. It is very exciting to be back! The teacher apartments, which were originally occupied by only the eight of us teachers, is filling up rapidly. Where once we were able to run through the halls making noise in our pajamas at 1 am, and where Leslie and Sydney could once use the halls to jog and exercise every morning, we now have real residents! I awoke the first morning to some sounds outside my window to discover two six year old tow-headed blonde girls playing tennis! I wasn’t quite sure how to digest this information for a moment. (apparently neither were the guards and landscapers walking by all agape) I later discovered that these girls are a pair of twins from Austria that will both be my second grade students. Cool. Robert told me that overall there are four or five new families living in the building and seven children. There are more on the way in the next few months.
One interesting effect of having a larger staff is going through first introduction conversations again. I remember doing it last year, but we were all new, so it was exciting. However, I think in the last few days I have had just about enough conversations about how young I am. I really am a baby here compared to many expats. People who have only just arrived patting my arm, asking my age, and saying things like, “Is this your first year here? I am so glad you came! Don’t worry you’re going to love it here!” and “Don’t worry, you will adjust quickly!” One older man at the bar (after asking my age about five times, and each time guessing lower and lower) was endeavoring to give me all the wise old philosophy of his years in drunken repeat, and when I seemed to him to be a little aloof, he turned to the man next to me and in a loud whisper said, “Young people are such a drag!”
Other exciting changes include the hiring of five new teachers, which makes the school seem bigger too. We hired an art teacher, a woman from the Phillipines, which means that I will not be teaching Art this year. While I will miss it, (I really loved teaching art) I am quite relieved not to be splitting my time between the classroom and the art room. We hired a new teacher, Rita Jolly, to teach the grade 3/4 class, and I will be a straight up grade two teacher with a class of 15-18 students. I am thinking that compared to last year, this will mean a little less planning time and a lot more paper grading time….In addition, I have the most culturally diverse classroom in the school thus far, with students from Taiwan, Korea, France, Austria, Germany, India, USA,….I don’t know where else offhand.
Other thoughts on my return to Dalian? It really is lovely here. But it has been raining pretty much nonstop for a week. The weather has been grey and cloudy. This is nothing like the sticky hot and humid days of sun that we saw last August, and people say that this rainy weather is very unusual. And I am starting to get a cold. Blast! Don’t want to start the school year with a foggy head.
I have decided to keep sending group emails as a means of communicating, since so many people have indicated that they enjoy it. But I need to revise the list a little bit. So, if you don’t want to be on my group email list, let me know. Some of you may receive my blogs automatically by e-mail, and that will be a duplicate of this. If you have a friend or relative or if there is someone that should be on the list and I missed them, let me know that too.
Au Revoir!,
Becky
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