International Teachers Take a Road Trip

When we taught overseas in Uzbekistan, we experienced our first “wow” when we realized we would be taking students to other countries for leadership, academic and sporting events. I took a group of Model United Nations students to Moscow, our basketball team traveled to Almaty (Kazakhstan) and Daniel took his speech team to Prague. It is stressful—especially when you don’t speak the language—but it is also a cool perk.

Here in Beijing, most of the International Schools have “Activity Week” in September. This is a week at the beginning of the year and the purpose is to allow grade level students to learn more about China (or the region), get to know each other and to take part in a community project. As a new staff person, one is forced to jump right in—ready or not.

Four teachers lead each grade level group—one of which is a native Chinese speaker. Daniel was placed with grade six, Anna was with grade seven and I was placed with grade eight. We all traveled for four to five days to some location in China—taking in sights, culture and food. 

Daniel’s group was the first to leave on Monday night, taking an overnight train to Xian, home of the Terracotta Warriors. He reported back that it was an amazing place, but would been better without sixth-graders who didn’t really appreciate all they were seeing.

Anna’s group also traveled by train to an area near Shanghai called Suzhou. They took in rickshaw riding, visited an orphanage, toured historical buildings and visited a silk worm factory.

My eighth-grade group traveled by bus to an area called Shido, which is 2-3 hours outside of Beijing. My trip was the most rugged of my family’s and had the most natural beauty. We visited mountain gorges, fed monkeys, farmed with peasants, went river rafting and tried out bamboo pole rafts. We also went horseback riding in the mountains and visited a local school. 

The local school part of our trip was the most impactful to me. We taught the 33 eighth-graders three games the day before—Duck Duck GOOSE (yes, I said goose you Minnesotans!), Zip-Zap-Zoom and head-up 7up—and bought notebooks, pens and suckers for the children at the school.  Once we arrived, we broke the kids up by grade level (the school was grades 1-6) and had them play games with the students to work on English skills. I worked with our Chinese speaker to go to grades one and two. We taught them the ABC song and had them draw cat pictures for us. I loved it!!! 

Daniel, Anna and I are now sharing stories of our separate trips and all desiring to see more of China. We will have an opportunity next Tuesday as we take a family vacation down the Yangtze River.