This trip to teach children in China was fun and enlightening despite the unexpected difficulties throughout the experience. I traveled to rural China for two weeks in June with eight other students to help the students practice and learn English. In total, we had about twenty high schoolers, but we were split into two groups traveling to different parts of China. Within these groups, we then paired off into two or three and were expected to plan lessons for students from third grade up to eighth grade. 

As a group, we managed to expose the children of the school we were teaching at in Shennongjia, China to the world outside of their little town. We were able to perform our goal, which was to help the students practice and learn English. I hope we were also successful in helping to break the students out of the Chinese culture of learning just to learn by involving the students and encouraging them to be interested in the material they were learning. The first day, we had sat in on an eighth-grade class and I noticed that a lot of the students had blank, bored faces because the teacher talked in rapid English. I believe that in our classes, we were able to perk up and involve the students. In the fourth grade class, the rowdiest class, the students would always be jumping out of their seats, literally, to answer questions or read words off of the powerpoint. 

In addition to the classes, we also set up a meeting session after classes which we dubbed The Culture Exchange. Here we just talked to a select amount of Chinese students, two on two, for half an hour. These sessions were probably more useful than the classes themselves. I feel as though these experiences have taught me valuable lessons. I now know the importance of always staying positive because of its effect on those around me. As someone who is not good at scheduling, this trip helped me get a better grasp of the time. In the forty-minute classes we had, my partner and I would often run out of material to teach, so we had to improvise. This has helped me get better at decision-making and thinking on the spot. 

As to the recreational activities in our offtime, there was a good balance between recreation and teaching on this trip. Every day, we woke up nice and early to eat breakfast before heading out to school. Then we had two to three hours to prepare for class if we hadn’t the day before. We had one or two hours to ourselves after lunch and all the time after dinner to use as we wished. My roommates and I had the biggest room so we would often invite the other high schoolers to watch horror movies. Unfortunately, we did have to wash our own clothes by hand, which was quite an experience for the first time. Despite getting sick over the weekend and losing my voice on the last day of teaching, I had lots of fun every single day on this trip. I am so grateful to all the people who made this possible: CAFA, qiaobao, the students and teachers of the school, my parents, the students who came to teach with me, and the counselors who accompanied us and kept us safe through the entire thing. If given the opportunity to go again, I would definitely take it.