More Team Building.

Wednesday 5th September 2012

Today I was told I had to wake up early. Early for me is when I have to get up for work at 6am, I do not appreciate that time in the morning. At all. So it was a lovely surprise when my chum got me up at 8am. We had to go the police station to apply for my temporary residence permit and it turns out I didn't need the pictures that were taken yesterday. Thank goodness we didn't pay for them!

However, when I got to the CC experiment centre, I found out that pretty much everyone else had to use their pictures so that was quite worrying! I was just hoping that we had all applied for the same thing, it would be rather awkward if we didn't. 

We split up into two teams again, this time I was with Georgia, Matt, James, Josh and Ollie, when he eventually turned up an hour and a half late. We walked to another branch of the CC english school and went to a classroom with 6 other teachers. We had another morning of getting to know each other style games. At first we played charades which is definitely hilarious to play with the teachers.

Then we had to pick a folded piece of paper with something to do with our childhood on it. Typically I was picked to go first and ended up with having to teach my favourite song from my childhood. Twinkle twinkle little star was the first one that I could think of so I taught that pretty well if I do say so myself, obviously working at a nursery has helped me exceed expectations, the teachers were loving it! Georgia had to say her favourite subject and she said art as a joke! So I shouted out for her to draw something to which she went bright red and looked completely horrified! It was hilarious. Anyone that knows Georgia knows how awful she is at drawing. Bless. She ended up drawing a few faces and we pretended that that sort of art that got the best grades. The worrying thing was that they actually believed us.

Then some random teacher said her favourite subject was music, so she sang Adele-Someone like you! And then she pulled Ollie up to sing to Justin Bieber - Baby luckily he's a good sport and went along with it. 

Then guess where we went for lunch... KFC again! Georgia had had KFC for breakfast again, so we were all dropping hints that we liked pizza hut or traditional Chinese food. They completely ignored all hints that were made. The KFC was the biggest one we had been in so far, and we had our first experience of some random Chinese people that we didn't know taking photos of us. Now that was surreal. It was almost like we were famous. I've just realised I don't think I've mentioned that in GuiYang, it was very rare to find any other race other than Chinese. The majority of the Chinese citizens had never seen a white person in real life before.

Then we went to Hebin park, although we weren't allowed on the rides which was a shame. with about 40 other teachers! I was surprised that a school could have this many teachers! We did some more team building games not surprisingly, and we eventually ended up having a massive game of football which was good fun. The best game we played was where we had to pass balloons to each other just using our legs. Now, I was well practiced at this game, probably because I have been involved in Girl Guiding thanks to my mum for as long as I can remember. The teachers weren't. Their reactions to it were very amusing!

Another highlight was James attempting to teach a few of the teachers to do the worm. Lets just say that this didn't go well. At all.

The bus back to CC English experiment centre was crazy. It was ridiculously full. This was my first experience of being completely crammed in the buses. It wasn't ideal! Looking back now, it was totally unnecessary as the park is less than ten minutes away from the school by foot. I think they just presume all English people are lazy and need to get transport.

T.I.P Training.

Tuesday 4th September 2012

Today we had our first T.I.P training and, to be honest, I don't  think our trainers know that most of us have little to no teaching experience! My experience has basically consisted of volunteering at brownies and 'mentoring' in a few classes at school. Not really enough to dive straight in! We are going to be what's known as 'facilitators', which is basically an assistant to the main trainers, to 22-40 year old CC English school teachers on the T.I.P training camp in a couple of weeks time. Slightly different to teaching 5-18 year olds like we had been told! 

We had orientation in the morning , which was basically a load of boring speeches which I only filtered in various bits of information which could possibly be useful. To get our 'motivation' a trainer named Stephen 'taught' us the macarena, but, not surprisingly, we all already knew it so it just turned into one crazy group dance! 

Our first task was to teach the trainers an English song; Josh was picked to teach them but we all joined in to help him! We chose head, shoulders, knees and toes as it was the easiest choice! After this, the trainers taught us how to teach it properly, apparently we weren't good enough. Not that we were surprised. After this we taught them hangman and duck, duck goose. 

Then, we were taught the Chinese version of 'Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?' which unfortunately included forfeits if you were caught with the cookie. Luckily I didn't lose, the Chinese seem to have an obsession with public humiliation and making us sing and dance. We couldn't very well refuse, we were getting paid after all! We then had a brief word before having KFC again for lunch. We definitely regret complaining about having the same Chinese meals for lunch everyday... this was turning into super size me! Especially for poor Georgia who was having it for breakfast and dinner as well! 

I then went with Georgia and Natasha, one of our mentors, to the hospital to get her stitches out. Her head is fine now, just a bit sore now and again but thats understandable! They put some sort of liquid on it that made it look like it was bleeding again. I'm definitely sure everyone wants to see a tasty picture of that... although it doesn't look as bad in the photo as it did in real life!

Then we went to a shop to get our photos taken 'professionally', as we are applying for a temporary residence permit and it needs to be taken to the police station along with my passport. Georgia and I got there before everyone else, so we had our photos taken before everyone else could come along and see how hideous they were! The photographer edited out our nice tans, making us look very white.

When we got back to the cc experiment centre, we split up into two teams, the fruit (Emma, Ollie, Ben, Dan, Josh and James) and the animals (Georgia, Alex, Hamish, Sam, Matt and I) to play team games. First Sam and Hamish played password; where one person has to guess the word and the other has to give them verbal clues, but are given a list of words they are not allowed to use. Then Alex and Matt played a similar game but they had to guess English sayings, but I don't think they were, as Sam had never even heard of them and thats saying something as he is the group genius! 

Unfortunately, they didn't have a game for Georgia and I, so we were nominated for being a facilitator by presenting the everyday procedure as follows:

1.Greeting

2.Tell the teachers what the ABC's are (Attack your limitations, Build your confidence and Commit yourself) 

3.Ask them to say the English only chant

4.Announce the c.i.c rules

5.Daily announcements

6.Results

7.English only updates

8.Encourage them to keep speaking english and not mandarin

Despite James obviously giving a better performance, the trainers gave me and Georgia more points! We then had a short break with some beverages and well sort after WiFi access.

The teachers then decided to mix things up a bit and swap the teams around. I was with Sam, Ollie and Josh. Each team had a character with a list of qualities and were asked to act them out. Our team got Sophie, a rich girl who was looking to Marry a suitable bachelor. We decided on Ollie as Sophie and I was Sophie's best friend. The other two teams had Ethan and Derek and had to win Sophie's affection. Ollie was given team points for best actor and I was given team points for best actress! SO in other words we were the least terrible. Seriously its like being on drama camp or something. But I didn't even care as my team won! Naturally, there had to be a forfeit, and it was for the other team to give us a massage. The forfeit was for the fruit to give the animals a massage... this didn't happen.

Ollie getting into character.