Tianyi Staff Shenanigans

I’m reaching the point in my time in China where I’m so busy I don’t have a lot of time to take photos. Sometimes people look at me funny when I take photos, too, like I’m a crazy tourist or they’re like, “Why the hell are you taking a picture of us?” and kind of expect the whole picture-taking thing to be a fad. So I don’t have pictures this week. Sorry.

This past Friday my fellow foreign teachers welcomed Claire and me with drinks. I still managed to invite people over to my place the next day for a non-alcohol evening filled with weird chocolate and multiple different card games. Dominique, Shaun, and Mark came over to play Fluxx (spelling?) and Euchre (yay Shaun is from the Midwest!). We nearly got into a game of Set, but I think we might save that for next time. Once Mark left, Dominique and Shaun and I sat around talking about fun stuff, like crazy college things and doing lighting tech in high school.

I suppose I should give a brief intro of my fellow Tianyi expat teachers. In no particular order:

1) Shaun is our 25 year old physics teacher from Wisconsin. As one of my few fellow nerds here, I’m pretty glad he’s around.

2) Dominique, our math teacher, is a couple years older than me (24-25, I think), and is a die-hard Oregonian who went to Willamette. She’s also a big Tamora Pierce fan and lives in my apartment complex.

3) Mark is another math teacher who focuses more on statistics and…uhhh…stuff. He’s closer to my parents’ ages and has a couple of kids who live in the states now. I think one of his kids is older than me. He and I tease each other about being old/young a lot.

4) Joe and Margaret are our general science teacher and English teacher respectively. They’re both great and like to hang out at the bar scene in Wuxi a lot (but really, who doesn’t?). I think they’re both around Mark’s age, but as staff we’re a little divided into people-who-really-are-adults and people-who-just-became-adults.

5) Nathan and Abby are a newly engaged couple who teach economics and English, respectively. I don’t know them quite as well; I met Shaun, Joe, and Margaret pretty early, and Dominique lives nearby, so I know those folks the best. Apparently Noah, my predecessor, was really close with Nathan and Abby.

6) Neal is our AP English teacher. He’s our oldest teacher and we definitely had a conversation where someone said he was old and looked up and said, “No, my FATHER is old.” One of the others replied, “No, your father is ANCIENT.” He doesn’t hang out with us a lot outside of work, but he’s a really great guy who I work with a decent amount because we’re both doing English with the G12s.

7) Steve is our Center Principal. He teaches AP Psych, but honestly he doesn’t really seem like a teacher to me because I knew him first as an administrator.

So far, I think all of the Tianyi expat teachers are pretty great. Some of them are people I might not normally hang out with, but honestly, that’s the beauty of being abroad – you can hang out and learn from folks who might ignore you or who you might not get along with at home.

Also, since I got to China, I think Microsoft Word’s grammar check is giving me problems on every computer. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that I can no longer speaky ze English.