Hi, my name is Emily Xu or 徐一苇. I was part of the 9-member group of ABCs (American born Chinese) sent to Shennongjia, China, to teach. We taught at a boarding school for two weeks with a 5-day vacation in between.

I was part of the Culture & Art team. My team’s three topics were American culture, sports, and music/dance; I mainly taught American culture, Yujia taught music/dance, and Brandon taught sports. We were planning to teach art instead of music and dance, but we figured that the students would rather learn about music and dance instead.

The students we taught were in the seventh and eighth grade; they were only a bit younger than us. There would be around 50 students in each class, so it was usually pretty stuffy inside the classroom. Instead of whiteboards, the classrooms had chalkboards; I was not accustomed to using chalk, so I ended up breaking a lot of chalk.

At most, we would only teach 3 lessons per day, so we would have plenty of downtime. During downtime, we would usually chill in the conference room or play on the track. The school’s track was very nice. It had a track (of course), volleyball court, multiple basketball courts, a soccer field, monkey bars, and ping-pong tables scattered around.

^Map of the school