Overseas Chinese Middle School of Yantai

The Overseas Chinese Middle School is located in the city of Yantai which is in the Shandong Province of China. The school is also known locally as the Number Five Middle School. The school provides instruction to students in grades Junior 1 to Junior 4 (6^th to 9^th grade in the United States). Located on Shengli Lu, the school is in the downtown area of the city and within easy walking distance of shops, restaurants and markets.

The campus of the school is laid out around a cinder track. Within the track is a cement playing fields where the students play basketball and football. There are also volleyball courts, a jungle gym and bars for gymnastics. The playground is ringed by trees and bushes and is quite nice, especially in the spring when the flowers are blooming. The playground is surrounded by the school buildings on one side and houses or offices on the other three.

View from the fifth floor of the balcony of the boarding school building.
The playground is in the foreground.

The school itself is actually divided into two parts: the boarding school (BS) and the non-boarding school (NBS). Each part has its own buildings for classes and the students generally don’t interact with the exception of exercise time and special activities. There are also several buildings on campus that house the boarding students with more buildings planned for the future as the school grows.

Like all schools in China, the families of the students must pay for them to attend the school. The BS is more expensive than the NBS, but BS students definitely get the better deal. The BS classes are newer and the classes are smaller with about 50 students per class. As the foreign English expert, I would teach each of my BS classes once a week. The NBS building is older and darker and the classes are larger (between 80 to 100 students per class). I would only have my NBS classes once every other week.

The Boarding School Classrooms.

The lives of the students are very structured, especially so for the boarding students. The students have classes six days a week, but Saturday is only a half day of classes. The day starts for the boarding students at 6AM when they must wake up to job around the track. The NBS students arrive soon after and the first class begins at 7:30AM. The day is filled with classes, morning exercises, lunch and naps. The day ends at 5:30 for the NBS students, but the BS students can look forward to an evening of studying in the classrooms. The day ends at 8:30PM for the younger students at 9:30PM for the older students. A complete schedule can be seen by clicking . The subjects that the students are taught include math, history, politics, chemistry, physics, Chinese, music, computers and of course, English.

The Non-Boarding School Classrooms

The teachers at the school work very hard since their schedules are as long as the students’ are. I mostly hung out with the English teachers, so I know mostly about their schedules. The teachers are in the classrooms as early as 7AM so that they can help the students with their studies before the first class. From my apartment, I could often hear the class next door reciting the days of the week or other exercises in English during the time between breakfast and the first period. The teachers also remain in the classrooms in the evening.

During the evening classes, the teachers have lessons or are there to help the students with their homework. Lastly, the teachers rotate the responsibility for staying in the dorms with the students at night. The teachers not only teach, but also serve as mothers to the students who see their teachers more often than they do their parents. The teachers are there to settle arguments or to be a shoulder to cry on.

All of the teachers were very accommodating to me as the foreign teacher. They were eager to help if I had questions and they would often pose English questions to me. But, the person who I went to the most was the Communist Party Secretary, Hou Xin Yu (Ms. Hou). She was great and often bent over backwards to help us with problems. She was pretty much our mom in Yantai and would often treat us to dinner to make sure that we were doing well. The headmaster and the principals are also very nice and held banquets for the foreign teachers every now and then. The school even held a banquet for my parents when they visited Yantai. Overall, all of the people at the school were simply great to work with and to be around.

Non-Boarding School Junior 2 Class
Performing "I'm a little tea pot"

The students were also great to be around. For the most part, the students are enthusiastic about their classes with the foreign teacher. However, the level of English proficiency could vary widely within the same class. Some students could carry on a conversation while others could not speak a word. Some students were eager to answer questions during class while others would duck their heads in an attempt to become invisible to the teacher. However, these same students could be chatterboxes outside of class. Some of the students would also knock on the door of my apartment if they wanted to ask an English question or just to chat.

I lived in an apartment on the fifth floor of the BS building. The apartment had two bedrooms, kitchen facilities, eleven sinks and a western toilet. Overall, the apartment was great and the foreign teachers are very well set up. Set up to the point that it is embarrassing since the Chinese teachers who live at the school live six to a room. The downside to the apartment was that it was always noisy since we lived on a hallway with classrooms. The students were always curious about what we were up to, so there was little privacy.

One night during my first semester at the school, Jason and I had a few of the other WorldTeach volunteers and some of our Chinese friends over for dinner. We sat at a table in the hallway and the students were able to make out our silhouettes through the frosted glass on our front door. We could hear the very common array of "Hello’s", but then one student yelled out "Oh, baby!" As the students’ teacher, I was blamed for this and everyone wanted to know just what I was teaching these kids.

For an idea of what it is like to work around thousands of kids, you can click here.

 jeffmahn@hotmail.com

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