Model School

Things have just gotten busier and busier. I've hardly caught a break since arriving in China. I thought it would calm down once we got to our host families, but it just got more intense. TEFL training became overwhelming as they tried to prepare us for Model School. There's just so much more information being thrown at us than we can possibly absorb right now, and we're supposed to use it within a few days to create a syllabus, write lesson plans, make homework assignments, a rubric, and a final assessment for a 2 week long course that we're supposed to just pull out of nowhere. Real students sign up for these and we get evaluated by several people while we teach. How we perform partially determines where we will get placed for our entire 2 years of service so... no pressure.

I've gotten pretty stressed out about it, even though the general message from our TEFL trainer is "don't stress out about it. just do your best. we know you're not going to know exactly what you're doing." The hard part is finding time to work on lesson plans and stuff. We are at the school from 8:30 (sometimes earlier) until 5:30 (sometimes later). If I go home, I'm bombarded with host family attention, which is really difficult to tear away from. By 10:00 I'm usually too tired to function anymore and I just go to sleep. I feel constantly behind in TEFL. It's kind of nice that Chinese isn't a challenge right now because it has completely taken a backseat to TEFL... as has everything else.

We partnered up to create the course and teach it. The first lesson, the two of us collaborate. Then the next 4 days one of us teaches. The next 4 days, the other teaches, and we collaborate again for the final. I opted to teach first so I could get all my stressing out of the way early.

After Model School, things will finally start to ease up. I'll actually have time to enjoy being here.