I had my first "teaching" duties this week. The students here are actually pretty fluent in English, but they don't seem to believe it. They tell me, "oh my English is SO bad!!" when in reality it's intelligible. I like to remind them that their English is FAR better than my Cantonese. :)

The classes I'm a TA for seem pretty interesting -- one is Current Issues in Music Education, and the other is Early Experiences in English, which is an early childhood education class. I've also helped a group with their presentation, which they'll give tomorrow in the music class.

The coordinators of our ETA program have at least tried to consider our personal interests and I feel like the classes I'll be the TA for will have relevance for me, so I'm happy about that. It's interesting to see how things are done here, and it's becoming clear that many of the stereotypes about Asian schools and students don't apply, at least in Hong Kong.

We sort of have schedules, but more activities keep getting tacked on so who knows how much I'll actually be responsible for. So far I'll be working in the two classes as well as helping at the Language Learning Center doing English assistance programs (small group tutoring, basically) and sitting at the Help Desk (read: being the grammar guru... I am very excited about this.) On top of that we're also supposed to coordinate activities with the students in the dorm (movie nights, coffee corner, etc) and work in the Jockey Club Primary School doing afterschool activities to develop these kids' "Multiple Intelligences." They've also got us sitting in a Hong Kong culture and history class, as well as more Cantonese sessions.

I have a feeling I'll be doing a bit more than 20 hours per week, but honestly it's not like there's anything else to do out here in Tai Po. Hopefully I'll have a 3-day weekend if I can rearrange my schedule a bit, but it seems unlikely. I'm just grateful that we aren't technically scheduled for Saturday [yet] -- it's common for people to work 6 days a week here.