Hello World

I am (almost) at the end of my first ever full-time teaching year.  Like most other teachers at this point of their careers, I just recently learned what it means to be in "coping mode".  However, that didn't manage to eat up all my passion and excitement for the upcoming school year, and my attempt to start this blog is proof of that.

The purpose of this post is to paint a little background for all future posts.  The school I teach at, Wuhan Maple Leaf International, is a private senior high school that is open to (mostly) Chinese students and follows the BC Grade 10 to 12 curriculum.  The Wuhan Campus is 5 years old, and the Maple Leaf company and its main campus in Dalian started in 1995.  We now have about 1500 students on this campus, and most of them live in the student dormitory during the week and go home on the weekends.  This year we have about 60 Canadian staff including BC subject teachers, language elective teachers, a librarian, an academic adviser, and admins.  We also have about 60 Chinese staff including homeroom teachers (aka counselors), Chinese subject teachers (Mandarin, Chinese Social Studies, Music, Art), main office staff, admins, student recruitment, etc.  Most of our students came to Maple Leaf after completing the official Chinese junior high school curriculum (Gr 9), and some even had up to one year of Chinese senior high school. Like most boarding schools in China, besides the normal 5 classes per day, they have morning and evening "self-study" blocks where they stay in assigned classrooms and work on their homework or studying.  They are literally in school from 7:30 in the morning to 9pm at night.  The vast majority of these students are ESL, and they usually go through one year of full-time language training before being allowed into BC courses.

Our school is a semester school. This year I taught 4 blocks of Pre-Calculus 11 last term, and this term I am teaching 2 blocks each of Pre-Calc 10 and 11.  Most of the material in these courses were taught in the Chinese public schools in Grade 7 or 8 except for anything related to functions and graphing.  The biggest challenge the students face in my classes are word problems.  They are extremely well-trained in symbol manipulation and calculations, but that doesn't make them math geniuses.  They still struggle with concepts that are new to them, and sometimes work habit or motivational problems.

So that's about all the relevant information of our school.  Starting next post, I'll talk more about specific events.