The China Diaries: That's Better, Isn't It?

Weekends are the busy period for teachers at my school. Since we teach lessons at a private institution separate from any public schooling, we don't have many classes during the week. Most are from Friday evening through Sunday night. We spend Monday through Friday planning for those weekend lessons. The planning portion is the stretch I struggle with. That's where the stress comes from.

This weekend was my first with a complete work load. EF builds up your Academic Credit Hours (ACH) over a month, to give you a chance to adapt and get settled. The last two days have been spent mostly in the classroom, and they've flown by at an incredible clip. Over the last month, I've spent most days feeling some degree of sick to my stomach. This weekend marked the first time since mid-September that I had the opportunity to teach without feeling ill at all. Turns out I still really do love teaching. I had almost forgotten.

Today was particularly good; I taught upper-intermediate 14-year-olds in the morning, a beginner one-to-one, intermediates after that, and then finally a class of seven-year-old beginners. It was a great day. It didn't solve most of the challenges of living in China, of course, but it certainly helped me to remember why I wanted to try and deal with them in the first place. As they say, what goes up must come down, but that doesn't mean it can't bounce back again.

No, I don't know who says that either.