Me? A Teacher???

While I am managing my future career, being a teacher is number 38 in my list of future professions, right after being a tightrope artist but still in front of being a human minesweeper. I don’t want to insult any teacher while I´m writing this but I just don’t think being a teacher is a profession I would see myself in 10 or something years. But maybe being a teacher is not so bad after all!

To this conclusion I came nearly one week ago. Last Friday I gave my first lesson in “Environmental-Water Education”. Ok let´s say I got a part of lesson. I shared the time with my dear “Green Oasis” colleague Xiao Du.

We are teaching at a primary school in the Xu Hui District (it is actually pretty close to my old high school Wei Yu) and this school is regarded as the best primary school in Shanghai. So you see I just roll with da best ;-) Our class contains 24 students age about 7. Our class is about everything related to their newly build “Eco-pond”. So of course a lot of things are related (surprise) to water.

And that is exactly what our first lessons contained: Information about German and Italian water. The first one who tells me which one was Xiao Dus part will get some candy…

I don’t want to bore you with the details about my no-questionable great PPT but just want to tell you how the presentation went down. When I stood in front of the “audience” and start talking I felt that these children were really focused and were listening to what I said. I really enjoyed it and I felt like I could teach them something and they were giving something back to me. This kind of communication was pretty exciting and it was fun talking to them and seeing how much they liked to participate, especially in my experiment: Which kind of water they would like more, German sparkling water “Appolinaris” or Chinese flat water “Nongfu Spring”. Appolinaris won 2:1of votes.

So in the end I felt some kind of happiness to see those children having fun or I hope they had! The laughing face of one of the girls who asked her teacher for permission to shake hands with me after the lesson or the young boy who said “Thank You” after he received “Rocher” for participating in the experiment (and damn, Rocher is frickin expensive here) in his nice Chinese accent that this time didn’t annoy me like it does when someone is praising his “cheap/original” Gucci bags on the streets. This time it filled me with some kinda joy!

There is always the possibility that the students didn’t like me at all and I am just to self obsessed to admit it but I´m pretty sure it was real :-)

Being a teacher just popped one place in my personal career ranking and is now No. 37. Since I will have the lesson regularly on Friday it may be even possible that being a teacher will outrun No. 36: human cannonball. We will see…

From tomorrow on I will be on my midstay in Henan! It is a trip where I and my fellow German volunteers will reflect our time so far and think about what is happening next or what kind of wishes we have. We will go to Henan, a province in the middle of China. It´s cold over there and I am very curious what is going to happen there…who knows! As far as I know we will be visiting a Shoalin temple. Sounds nice but we are in China…there is always a little surprise somewhere ;-)

Till than take care and a nice third Advent!

L.