"You are so very busy."

Now, for the life of a lao shi (teacher). First, let me elaborate on my living conditions. I'm living in what is basically a deluxe dorm room, in the same building as some of my actual students at the Huzhou New Century Foreign Language Primary School. For some background, Chinese people, and Chinese students in particular, work HARD. They go to school from 7am to 7pm, and those whose parents are wealthy enough and/or too busy to take care of them, send them to private schools, such as New Century, where the kids sleep on campus Sunday night through Friday evening.
My "apartment," features a microwave and a mini-fridge for a kitchen, which means that my meals have mostly been in the school cafeteria, which is free, but also free of any variety. The weekly menu is mostly made up of different variations of pork and rice, such as pork nuggets with pig sauce over rice, or rice with pork bits over bacon. Meanwhile, above the service counter, illusory images of fresh fruits and vegetables taunt the diners. Thankfully, one benefit of globalization is that I was able to find peanut butter in the local supermarket, which has helped me coat my stomach for the swine-ification of my diet. My bathroom consists of a squat toilet and a pipe emerging from the wall (the shower), both being contained within a 3' x 3' cell. On the bright side, every time I take a shower, I'm simultaneously cleaning the toilet!
By Chinese standards, my living situation is glamorous for a teacher. The Chinese teachers on campus actually share the same room that I have between two people, only with no computer, T.V., or air conditioning. My initial response to the location of my living quarters was the general awkwardness of living down the hall from my 12 year old pupils. This uneasiness has since come into fruition in the form of door bell ditch, which has conditioned me to never answer the door when I'm not expecting company. The biggest downfall so far is the random stampedes of kids who come barreling down the stairs in various waves between 6-9pm , when they're finally done with their days work. Headphones are able to drown out the noise of these herd migrations, but unable to keep the building from shaking.
I have absolutely no teaching experience, and as previously mentioned, very little formal training. So, you can imagine my response when I found out I would be teaching 225 students per week, in 7 different classes, ranging from grades 6-10. "Bu yao!" My favorite new phrase, which means "I don't want to," and sounds exactly how it looks.
Turns out, the students are mostly ideal language sponges. It's just unfortunate that their energy isn't constantly harnessed for productive learning. At the risk of losing some American masculinity points, I'll go ahead and say that Chinese kids, (before they reach the universal, grunting, indifference to the world age of high school), are adorable. They can then be further broken down into three sub-categories; the shy ones who avoid eye contact and cover their mouths when they speak, the out-going ones who raise their little T-Rex limbs as high as possible in any question answering opportunity, and then the ones who have some kind of energy imbalance and have continual outbursts of screaming and flailing limbs. The most difficult day of my week is Wednesday, when I have to catch the 7am bus to get to the high school, teach 2 classes of tenth grade, followed by one 9th grade class, then take the bus back to the primary school campus where I get to wind down in the afternoon with back to back classes of 42 6th graders, who for lack of a better word, are crazy. Hopefully, teaching 16 year-old's how to ask for directions to the bank, on the same day that I teach 11 year old's how to say "nice to meet you," won't turn me into a schizophrenic. In looking at what you could say is the tin lining of the situation, there's no shortage of enthusiasm in the younger students. A big hit in all of my classes was showing the students pictures of my family and friends, which caused so much commotion that they literally ripped one of the photos while fighting over who could look at it first. (Sorry Mom, it was a picture of you). It's nice that there's never a shortage of volunteers to read out loud in front of the class, but the trade off is that their enthusiasm knows no bounds. They're equally enthusiastic about rolling around on the ground and chest bumping each other whenever its time to stand up for a game of telephone. Contrast this with the tenth graders who would be perfectly content to sleep through every waking minute of the day, and you have a recipe for very difficult lesson planning. Every day when I leave the high school, my colleague, previously mentioned in the ganbei showdown, looks at me with a look of utter despair and says "Oh, you are so very busy," to which I can only nod my head, and say, "Yes, I am."
This is by far the most challenging job I've ever undertaken, and combined with trying to learn functional Mandarin I will be "so very busy" for the remainder of 2008.