SSTers arrive at service teaching locations
China SSTers are spending their first night in the towns that will be their homes for the next five weeks. They will be teaching English in three secondary schools, living with host families in each place. All three schools are hosting SSTers for the first time, so all sides are negotiating relationships and expectations anew. Given our encounters today, it is clear that all the schools are eager to have the Goshen folks teaching oral English. Having native English speakers in the classrooms is uncommon for schools in these places where foreigners are rare. In each place we were welcomed formally by the principal and asked to pose for formal group photos. In Guang’an the welcome was recorded on video and in Yilong the school took the group to a welcome banquet in a downtown restaurant.
About 8:30 am on October 13 two buses left China West Normal University campus in Nanchong. Amanda, Angeliky, Lee, Reuben, Sam, and Vince (accompanied by Rachel) went southeast to the city of Guang’an and the Friendship Middle School. (In China, junior middle school refers to grades 7-9 and senior middle school refers to grades 10-12. Most SSTers will be teaching senior middle school students, although a few may have sections of 9th grade junior middle schoolers.) Friendship Middle School is well-known in this region for high academic standards. It has an enrollment of 8,000 students in grades 7-12. Most of the English teachers the group met are alumni of China West Normal University, our SST host institution here in Nanchong.
A larger bus took the remaining SSTers and Steve north. This group arrived first in Yilong, where Adrienne, Bryan, Ellen, Jacob G., Kiernan, and Yuli will be teaching at Virtue Middle School. Virtue has 5,300 students in grades 7-12 and 281 faculty and staff. The buildings and campus are quite new, we learned as we received a tour of the grounds. Yilong has six secondary schools and of these Virtue Middle School is the largest and best in terms of student test scores. Yilong is a more rural and somewhat less developed county within the larger prefecture and school administrators are quite keen to improve their community’s status through education. The school provided a luncheon banquet for both their SSTers and those going on to Langzhong. We went to a downtown restaurant in Yilong in the restaurant we had to walk through a wedding reception to get to and from our banquet rooms. As the rare foreigners in town we seemed to draw over more interest than the bridal party, as wedding guests craned their necks to catch a glimpse of us.
Mid-afternoon the bus made its final stop in Langzhong’s East Wind Middle School. Diana, Garrett, Grace, Hannah, Jacob S., Liz, Michael, and Zoe will be teaching here. East Wind has a history of more than 100 years in Langzhong and today has about 7,000 students. Its principal is a China West Normal University graduate. The school was highly organized, with an appointed coordinator for the SST program – a long-time teacher who has been to Canada and is fluent in English. He had already divided the Goshen students into three teaching groups and prepared class schedules for them. The SSTers began planning lesson topics.
Due to the different times we arrived at the schools, the photos we have to post are not all the same. For Guang’an and Yilong we were able to take photos of the SSTers and the host families. In Langzhong, the host families were arriving at the end of the school day (5:30 pm), but the bus driver and representative from China West Normal University who accompanied us needed to leave at 4:45. So although Steve spent several hours with the SSTers in Langzhong, he was not able to photograph the host families. In Langzhong, all the host families are households with a child enrolled at East Wind. In Yilong and Guang’an most of the host families are teachers at the respective schools, but a few are families of students enrolled at the schools. In any case, every host family in every place is connected in some way to the school where the SSTer is working.
At all three schools the SSTers will do classroom observation on October 14 and then begin some teaching on the 15th. We will visit each location twice during the next five weeks and will post pictures are updates after each visit.
