Bridget O'Donnell

China is a big fan of nowism. Nothing illustrates this fact more clearly than the news I received this afternoon that my teaching schedule will completely change, starting tomorrow morning.

Yes, as of tomorrow, I will no longer be teaching 15 third and fourth grade classes. Instead, I will teach 16 first grade classes.

The switch is part of a little experiment my school is partaking in. (Hah, my “Experimental school” is doing an experiment). Per suggestions from the Education Bureau, the English department at Luoling decided to make the class sizes smaller. As the school is a “Foreign Language School,” it only makes sense to cut the typical 50 student classroom in half, down to 25. This change will only apply to English classes.

Halving classroom sizes doubles the number classes needed. They’re bumping me down to first grade because they want to focus on perfecting pronunciation earlier in the students’ educational development. (As you may or may not know, I teach conversational English to the students. My students have a second English class with Chinese teachers that focuses more on reading and grammar).

Now, first and second grade classes will all have split English instruction. This means that half of the students in one class will come to me one day in the week, while the other half stay behind with their Chinese English teachers. On another day in the same week, the other half will come to me while the first half stays behind.

The number of classes may be doubling, but there aren’t enough foreign teachers at Luoling* to make up for the classes that I’ll be giving up to teach first grade. So the entire fourth grade will no longer have a 外教 (wai jiao, foreign teacher).

On the bright side, I now have my own classroom on a closer campus — before, I had to go to all 15 classrooms separately via a 15 minute walk from my apartment — and my smaller classes will be easier to manage. But I fear it will be a difficult transition from fourth grade to first grade, especially now that I won’t have a Chinese teacher in the classroom translating things my students don’t understand.

And I wasn’t expecting to say goodbye to my fourth graders so soon.

Oh, nowism.

*I’m one of three American teachers here.

Related posts:

1. How’s this for a mouthful?: The name of my school
2. An apology to grade school teachers, on behalf of bratty students everywhere
3. Nowism: “Your holiday break actually starts today”
4. “Oh, they didn’t tell you?”
5. PICTURES OF CUTE CHINESE KIDS!!!1!