This experience was truly eye-opening. I’ve been to China plenty of times before, but this was
the first time I was able to really interact and contribute to the community, in this case, it was
teaching.

Going into this experience, I had lots of preconceptions about what I’d expect. I thought that the
students would be completely unaware of anything outside of China and that interactions with
them would be very rigid. However, that was completely not the case. They knew what football
was, they listened to American song artists, they knew about basketball teams. They definitely
had knowledge about the outside world. Looking back at it, I think I was extremely
narrow-minded thinking that the students wouldn’t know anything about the outside world.
Furthermore, even though the school is very strict and all the students were very disciplined,
they were all very outgoing and would constantly interact, contrary to what I had previously
believed. At first, I felt extremely awkward about teaching the students because we were all in
the same grade and they were most likely smarter than me, so it felt a bit weird at first. However,
I started to become more comfortable with this situation after realizing that the students found
everything, we taught them extremely interesting and were well engaged during all our classes.
After teaching the classes, the students invited us to do various things with them, like playing
badminton and exercising. We even competed in some fun games with the students.
One thing that I was unaware of was that this teaching experience would go both ways. I got to
practice my extremely rusty Chinese with the students, and they were able to teach me new
words and slang. In addition, through all the conversations with the students, I was able to learn
about the different customs and small aspects of everyday life in China. For example, some of
the students were kind of enough to explain to me how applying for colleges worked in China,
and it surprised me how different the education system was. However, despite my initial shock
and confusion, they were able to thoroughly explain this concept to me, and I was able to come
out of that conversation with a new acquired knowledge that I could apply to my own college
applications. It truly amazes me how I came to this school to teach them lessons about America,
and I ended up learning my own lesson about Chinese culture.

The aspect of this trip that I valued the most were the connections that I was able to make with
all the students. Despite only being at the school for 2 weeks, I was able to foster many
friendships with the students. And thanks to technology, I can keep interacting and teaching
them through our own conversations online. I think that making long lasting relationships with
new people is one of the most important things in life, because it helps to truly open your
perspective about the world, and including the perspectives of these students will definitely
improve me as both a student and a person.