The new campus!

Starting July 25th, I will be teaching middle school students for 2 weeks at a different campus. I will be doing this with 3 other teachers from my team. We took a tour of the campus yesterday and were amazed! This new campus is 100 times better than the campus that we are on right now! The classrooms are small, but they said if the weather is nice, we will even be able to hold class outside in the courtyard area! The cafeteria is more like a banquet hall, and the dorms are like hotels! They even have a balcony. I will get spoiled with this for 2 weeks, and then have to go back to the old campus :) Me and another girl decided to stay on this campus for the 2 weeks, so we will have to move some of our stuff. The two boys decided to just commute back and forth every day, since it is not so far. I asked to live on this new campus because I want to spend as much time with the students as I can. I think spending time with them out of class time is so important, because then they can see that we are people too, not just teachers. We are not sure of the English levels of the students yet, since they come from all over China. I hope that we are going to be able to carry on conversation with them.
Teaching English here has been really good for my patience. You have to choose your words so carefully, and speak so slowly, that you must limit what you say. I find myself accidentally talking to my teammates very slowly! :) It's interesting to have to explain so many new words to the students. It's hard to explain some words, because we've used them for so long that we can't really break it down. Each day, the students use a computer program to listen and record themselves in order to improve their pronunciation. The program teaches them many idioms. So the students go around saying, "It's raining cats and dogs outside," or "thanks a million," or "I love you to death." It's pretty funny. They are learning some words that we don't even use. Some of them also have British accents. So cute! It's funny that even though they are all older than me, they almost feel like children. I hope it's not demeaning to them that a younger person is teaching them. After all, they are all teachers. One student told me, "You may be young, but you know English, and English is power." Hmmm.