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Chris Kelly
My name is Chris Kelly, I'm twenty five and I used to live in Southport in the north west of England where I worked as a Computer Administrator in a transport company. Thanks to ITC I'm now working in China as a TEFL Teacher. I'd highly recommend the ITC TEFL course. It gave me a good introduction to the basic techniques used to teach TEFL as well as the chance to gain some practical experience at using them by making and delivering my own lesson plan.
Once I'd completed the course I researched TEFL in China, and registered my interest in a position by email. Two days later I received an offer and accepted on the spot.
The agent through whom I found the position met me at the airport. I was then driven to his home in Shijiazhuang (the capital of Hebei Province) where I stayed for two days before I was transferred over to my school and shown to my own private apartment.
The school I teach in is large (around 7,000) students aged 12 - 18. It is very modern as Chinese schools go and this month work on a new football stadium and running track should be completed. The students are well mannered, intensely curious, playful and hard working. I teach 13, 40 minute periods per week to classes of 65 students. My role is as an oral English teacher supplementing their Chinese teachers work on grammar, reading and writing. I see my job as motivating the students to use English, boosting their confidence, inspiring them to make a difference in their lives by learning English, and generally giving them a bit of fun during their gruelling 7 day schooling schedule.
During holidays I travel. So far I have seen Hong Kong, Beijing, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and had access to all sorts of fascinating areas of Chinese life that no tourist could hope to penetrate.
Living in China is nothing short of amazing. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's gross, sometimes it's beautiful, it's always entertaining. If you are amused by the small things in life then China is the place for you. On the surface living in China is the same as living in the West. You get up you go to work, you eat and then you go to bed. But once you get past those basic human functions, everything in China is done differently. For example, the traffic is nothing short of insane, the most important part of a car in China is the horn, people drive the length of the street with holding their hand down on the hooter. Multiply that by the three hundred thousand cars in my city, not to mention the mopeds and bicycles and you will get an idea of what a Chinese street sounds like dawn till dusk.
China is dirtier than the west, at least outside of Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen it is. People wear the same clothes five days of the week, mainly because the streets are so dirty that they don't want to have to keep washing different sets of clothes all the time. Things happen more slowly over here, time is more flexible and so you have to be more flexible. I've long since given up getting annoyed when someone who said they would turn up at 15:00 turns up at 16:30 and offers no explanation.
Overall China is a developing country, but it is certainly doing very well for itself. Everything you can buy in the west you can buy over here, though sometimes at a slightly lower quality.
Life is very family orientated and people are incredibly friendly. Expect casual conversations to result in invitations to dinner, where everything will be paid for, and any offer to pay will be taken as an insult.
Living in China has been an eye opening experience for me in so many ways. It's made me appreciate all the things we take for granted in the west i.e. cleanliness, material goods and slightly freer society. I feel more in touch with the daily reality of the world. Now that I've freed myself of some of the more decadent western trappings I could happily live in any country in the world, living in China has shown me that I have a strength and an ability to adapt that I never knew I had. But most of all I've learned to appreciate my family and close friends. I lived away from home back in England when I went to University, but I didn't miss my family that much as they were only a few hours drive away. But when you are 5,000 miles away from home when you have no connections no one you know you can really trust then you realise just how important family can be.
At least that's in my experience.
I hope you've enjoyed reading about my experiences and I hope that it may inspire you to take the big step, and who knows I might even see you out here.
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Living in China is nothing short of amazing. |
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Chris Kelly
ITC Student |
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