Back in the Middle Kingdom

Two years.  Two years I was away from this place.  And in those two years both I and the country have changed.  And yet we still seem to agree with each other.

The skies are still grey most days.  The subways are horridly crowded.  And there seems to be constant construction.

And I've missed it all.  So very, very much.

My first days here were spent at a hotel.  The Jinjiang Hotel right across the street of Shanghai Stadium to be exact.  It was an interesting experience, full of free breakfasts and smoking (sometimes shirtless) Chinese businessmen.  We (me and the rest of the June 1 hires) were put up here for two weeks, giving us time to acclimate to the city and find apartments.

                                   My hobbit hotel room.  Yes, there was a tiny bathroom as well.

My first thought after opening my hotel room door for the first time: "I'm living in a hobbit hole."  Unfortunately, I am not a hobbit, and every once in a while would have Gandalf issues, bumping into walls because of the surprisingly close proximity of everything in the hotel room.  I slowly adjusted to the space in the two weeks I was there, but was thankful after I had gotten out.  In my apartment now I don't have to step outside into the hallway to change my mind....

The classic Bund picture, but with extra fog.  You can't see the tops of the tallest buildings in this picture.

I had no proper work responsibilities my first week in Shanghai.  Which was perfectly fine as I was going to bed at 8pm each night and waking up at 4 or 5 every morning (I felt like I was turning into my parents...).  After a week of some exploring and a lot of sleeping, I was finally back to my normal grumpy self in the mornings, grudgingly waking up at 8 or 9 only if I absolutely had to.

In the first week, I met some of the new hires, usually by randomly running into them the lobby of the hotel or at the main office for New Pathway.  They come from many walks of life, spanning econ to psych to biophysics majors, and coming from USC to NYU to U Chicago.  All of us are American (with the exception of one Canadian...but we don't talk about him).  Most of the newest hires are just out of undergrad, with a few exceptions: one just finished his first year of law school and decided and  a break was needed, another is 30 and has been teaching in US high schools for a few years already.  No matter our backgrounds, we all had to go through two weeks of training, guiding us to become the best teachers we can be (or something like that).

New Pathway Education is a now Chinese-owned company (under the parent company EIC Education) that employs mostly US university graduates for test prep for the ACT, SAT, SSAT (to get into boarding schools), AP, IB, TOEFL, and probably a few other acronyms that I cannot remember at the moment.  Most of our kids come from international schools or international divisions of local schools here in Shanghai.  These are the children of the upper class, whose parents (who can afford such things) believe that going to university in the States is the best path.  Some of them are American born but have grown up in China, others have been in China all their lives.

After two weeks of "training" (which didn't really make me confident in my teaching abilities only because I felt I didn't have all that much practice teaching), I was thrown into my first few classes.  During the summer, we have three summer sessions, each three weeks long.  I'm teaching ACT Reading for two levels of kids (Foundations and Advanced) for each session.  The first session had three kids in one and four in the other.  The second session, which I am currently in the middle of, has 6 kids in one and 5 in the other.  Teaching is interesting.  New Pathway has in-house material, including text books, that I teach from.  The rough thing about teaching the ACT Reading section is that I don't actually teach concepts, I teach strategies.  But the easiest way to do well on this section is to just read fast.  Which I can do well.  This is not necessarily true of some of my students, especially those whose first language is not English.  So what does this mean for me? It means that I feel like a useless teacher sometimes, because teaching people to read fast is not something that can be done in three weeks.  However, their scores still go up for each mock test (they take three throughout the course), and that provides some satisfaction for me.

The apartment in which I now live is a two-bedroom, shared with another New Pathway teacher.  He and I have....different personalities.  He grew up in Hong Kong, the son of a man from West Virginia and a woman from Shanghai.  He went to school at USC (Southern California, not South Carolina) and it shows.  He speaks the Southern Cali dialect, throwing out words like "dank" "bro" and "cabsky" (cab).   Listening to him talk is amusing and a fascinating study on the evolution of words throughout the country. And I thought Southerns spoke funny.  However, he pays half the rent, so at least he has that going for him.  The apartment is in a very high income compound, full of families that drive Mercedes, BMWs, Teslas, and the occasional Maserati or Bentley.  It's just a 15-minute walk from the main New Pathway campus.  Unfortunately, this summer I am not working at that campus, but at the campus in Pudong, which is about an hour commute by packed subway in the morning.

                                                                      My building

                                                                           My room

                                                     The living room (with the roommate)

                                                                          My kitchen

I've explored the city some since I've been here: wandering about the French Concession (which has a large number of bars...), walking along the Bund at night, going to the plethora of high-end malls they have here.  Summer session is unfortunately one of the busier times during the year, so I won't be able to travel at all until August at the earliest.

                           A street in the French Concession, identified by the trees on every street.

I have many more things to talk about and show you, but this post had already gotten a little long.  So I will save other things for other posts.

I am alive.  And I am in China.  So far, so good.