"Teacher? I don't want."

"You don't want to? Larson, I'm pretty sure that's Chinglish!"

So today is my fourth day of teaching, and it's been an enlightening experience to say the least. English is a hard, strange language, and I'm certainly lucky that it's my first. Some things I've learned about Chinese: it doesn't use articles (a, an, the), it doesn't have tenses (just present), and it doesn't require spaces between words (don't really need them with characters).

I am lucky enough to teach four different classes six days a week. I'd have to say that my first day was tough working 1:30-4pm and then again with back to back classes from 4:40-8:40 pm. And I thought working full-time in an office was tough. The kids I have are generally well behaved. The boys are squirrely, and of course the girls can be mean and exclude each other--what else is to be expected? I just hope that they can all find a love for this language that most of them are forced by their parents to learn.

Kids in Taiwan have it rough--or, at least to an American they do. This is summer vacation from Chinese school, but that doesn't mean that they have vacation from their handful of cram schools. Some of the kids I teach go to English school for over 8 hours a day and have other classes that they are going to on top of that. One girl I have has English school, and then goes to piano school. Another kid has to come late to class because he has swimming. I spoke to one of my students, Rick, in the hall yesterday, and asked him what he did over the weekend. I thought he would respond with something like he played on the computer, or played outside. Instead he said, "Nothing." Puzzled by his response, my follow up question was, "Did you study?" He replied, "Yes, all day."

Wow. And we complain about not having enough down time.

All the same, I'm loving it.