Is that my cow? No, it goes arrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggh. It is a hippopotamus. It is not my cow.

I was correcting papers today, reading the same sentence over and over again, trying not to skip to the end because, I guarantee you, these kids can copy a sentences correctly, copy it wrong, and then copy it correctly two more times. I’m not sure how. As I worked, the back of my mind began to read me Terry Pratchett’s book Is That My Cow, which is probably the most entertaining thing I know written in four word sentences. That is how most of my classes go. ‘What is it?’ ‘Is it a pig?’ ‘No it isn’t. It is a spider.’ Justin, my boss who’s taught English here for the last four years, says he catches himself talking to his parents in short declarative sentences.

I’ve started writing about teaching a couple of times: once half way through my training, and again after my first day. Both times I stopped about a paragraph in. It’s not that I didn’t have time to write. It’s only now that I’ve started to get piles of homework to correct that I’ve really started to feel the time disappearing. I mean, I only actually teach for 15 about hours a week. But I think I’m finally figuring out what I’m doing, and finally figuring out what I’ve got myself into.

I teach lots, and lots of kids. My class youngest kids are just barely learning to write Chinese, but they’re already expected to write in English. This is an interesting challenge, but it isn’t stressful because if they don’t, well, they’re little. So I play games, and if the only thing keeping the room from descending into complete chaos is my wonderful Taiwanese teaching assistant Anna who explains the games and helps me herd them into place, so what, they’re little, and they’ll learn. My oldest kids are in high school. Queue the ominous music. But, so far, I like my advanced classes. I have two of them. The bored, ‘I’d rather be anywhere but here’, and If I sit quietly and don’t do any work do you think the new teacher will notice?’ class, and the ‘I actually want to learn English and am willing to talk,’ class. The difference is that they are advanced enough to understand most of what I’m saying. And to make sentences more interesting than ‘is that a pink elephant’. And that is when new languages start being fun. It’ll be a challenge. Bored teenagers are hardly the most receptive audience, and, unlike the little kids, they can’t be bribed with fake money. But it could be really interesting, which is more than I can say for my last few jobs.

I’m having more trouble with the kids in the middle. They have so much material to get through. And on top of that, I’m expected to be entertaining. This isn’t that hard: races, ball games, anything to burn off a little energy and bonus if it helps them drill sentence patterns. ‘What is it, it is an Umbrella bird’ is slightly more interesting when scribbled on the board by a child who’s just run three times across the class room, and thrown a ball at a badly drawn picture of my TA, but not much. Not yet. I think it’ll get better when I actually know the kids. When I figure out which ones want to learn. There is a little girl who keeps coming into the Teacher’s room to talk with another of the foreign teachers. Her English still has a long way to go, but she keeps talking. It’s so fun listening to her trying talk about her day, and what she’s going to do. Not because she makes mistakes, but because she’s trying so hard to get it right, and it’s working.