February 11, 2017
1:00 am
Beijing, China
I’m going to write this super quickly because I have to be awake in 6 hours. Today has been a super long day, although it didn’t look that way from the beginning. I believe I mentioned yesterday that I had an open door today. An open door is when parents come to watch the class. With Small Stars, it’s not a huge deal, especially now that I’m more accustomed to teaching. You basically run the class as normal, but try to ensure that you’re highlighting the students’ speaking abilities. Today I had an open door for my Small Star Blues. At this stage, parents are usually just happy that their kids can say, “Hello, I’m (name),” and can sit well. As such, I wasn’t too nervous about the class. It ended up going alright. The one student in that class who tends to be a bit naughty was even worse than normal, which caused a bit of a commotion when doing activities. Other students were quieter or unusually well-behaved, which isn’t surprising. Overall, the parents seemed to be happy and the kids had fun, which is all you can really worry about when teaching 3-year-olds.
The thing that made today so crazy was planning for tomorrow. So on Thursday, Emma told me that I had the Small Star Blue open door today. Like I mentioned, it was Small Stars, so no big deal. Then I was also informed by the other Emma that she wanted me to do an open door for my High Flyer C class on Saturday. This is a little more difficult to prepare for. Unlike Small Stars, High Flyer open doors don’t have a lesson plan. You have to plan, by yourself, activities that will highlight what the students have learned over the past three units (9 lessons). You have one hour of preparation and then one hour of open door. I haven’t done one of these yet, so I’m a bit nervous. Plus, these students are brand new, haven’t learned a lot, and there are 16 of them. I felt a little overwhelmed when Emma asked, but I knew I could handle it. Everything was going fine due to my lesson planning yesterday until I walked into work today. One of the other PAs, Sunny, flagged me down and said that we have another open door for High Flyer G on Saturday. At this point, I was starting to get stressed. I had to teach classes tonight and somehow plan for two High Flyer open doors. I ran myself ragged planning for them. I even had to email myself stuff so that I could work on it once I got back home for the night. It is now 1am and I have finally finished planning.
One question that I’ve been asked, even by people who work at EF and some who work with me, is how I didn’t know about these beforehand. Open doors are on the syllabus for certain lessons. As such, a teacher should be able to figure out when they will have the open door. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that they actually fall on the lessons they’re supposed to. The Small Star Blue open door was supposed to happen last Friday, but we had to push it back because of low attendance (I was previously aware of the original date). The thing is, Emma didn’t specify when we were pushing it to, so I wasn’t aware that it had been rescheduled. The other two High Flyer open doors actually fell on lessons where my co-teacher was supposed to be teaching. Because of Spring Festival, these were also pushed back. Normally in these instances, it is pushed to the next lesson the assigned teacher teaches. In both of these cases, though, the PA decided to switch teachers. Because of this decision, the open doors weren’t even on my radar. They came as a complete surprise. Usually these day-before surprises are kept in check by our weekly Monday meetings. Unfortunately, because of Spring Festival last week and Winter Academy this week, we haven’t had a meeting in a while. Obviously, that just spells disaster and I get to be the lucky one the consequences fall upon.
Anyway, I’m now finished with my lesson plans. While I still have a couple of activities I have to finish preparing for, I’m mostly done. Tomorrow I teach a full day of classes starting at 8:45 and ending at 6:30. That said, I should probably head to bed.
Goodnight,
Kristen
