Back to School

After just over a week of getting my bearings in the city it was back to school and back to work. Through a colleague of D's I had managed to get in touch with the supply manager at The Canadian International School, which is in Aberdeen on the South-West of the island.

After a quick email and a couple of phone calls, it was decided that I would complete a day's cover in the lower school, within the PE department. I thought that this would be the best place to start, to help get a feel of what it would be like working in an HK school. The staff bus picked me up from just outside the apartment building at 6:40am, which meant that I got to school an hour before the start of period 1 at 8:05.

As with most buildings in HK, the school is an architectural marvel and has been built into the side of a granite hillside about 150m high. This means that you walk into the building on the 9th floor, with the middle and upper schools taking up the 9 floors below the entrance and the lower school accommodating the 5 floors above the main concourse.

The Canadian International School

Having established that I was covering the VERY lower school, it was time to head to the junior sportshall (1 of 3 sportshalls) to prepare for my first foray into teaching in HK. Having thought I may have to teach baseball or american football, I was pleased to hear it wasn't one of these, but even more frightened to find I would be teaching 3 hourse of 'scooter ball'. This turns out to be a mixture of handball and ice-hokey that is played with the kids sitting on small trolley like apparatus (as shown below) and pushing themselves around using their feet.

Trolley Ball Trolleys

After three lessons of trolley ball I had had quite enough and was pleased to find out that the afternoon session was a little bit more within my sphere of knowledge. A nice multi-skills session with 3 different prep classes. I am definitely built for secondary school teaching however, as after a day teaching the little ones, my back was in pieces. However, as the school day finished at 1430 and the bus home doesn't leave till 1620, I decided it was only right to try out the schools 140 piece fitness suite. The staff at the school were great to me all day and I look forward to a couple more days next week, when I'm going to be covering some other subjects which should be interesting, as long as it's not mandarin!

I have also heard from the American International School in Kowloon and the English Schools Foundation about some more supply work, so I will hopefully have enough to buy that iPad in the not too distant future. Keep those early morning call coming!

Catch up again soon!

Live long and prosper!