Kids are loud in every language

I arranged to meet someone at a hotel in Chengdu so they could accompany me to the school (location still unknown). I arrived at 7:40am and met the guy and we drove ONE HOUR to Deyang (德阳） Primary School. I was told the school was in the outskirts of Chengdu, but this was stretching outskirts a little far I think. As I saw when we finally arrived, the school is not just a school, it is a complex. There are about 8 or so huge 6 story red brick buildings all over the place. Apparently 2000 children attend class here, grades 1-6, and 1500 live there on campus, so some of the buildings are housing. I was handed my class schedule for the day and learned that I was to be teaching 5 classes of 6th graders for 40 minutes each. I walked in to the first class of 40 students and just went with it. I had been thinking about what I was going to do for the past few days and was really nervous about it, but once you get there you just do it and it all works out. And it did. I started out by introducing myself and then having each student introduce themselves by saying "My name is....., I have # people in my family, and I like......". Then I had them name off some of the things people had said they liked and then do that exercise where you find one person who likes each activity and write their name down. Then we played pictionary where I divided the class into two teams and picked a drawer from each team and then whoever said the word first won. After playing with the first class I realized that with 40 kids this way was WAY too loud and also the kids didn't really get the game, they would draw some scribble as fast as they could and then run back and tell their classmates what to say, no matter how many times I said they couldn't. So the nice thing about teaching 5 of the same class in a row is you can work on it and get better each time. So then I tried one person from each team drawing and then when someone knew the word running up to the black board and writing the word down, but that was still loud because people would yell out the word to the person who ran up to write and then everyone would just stand by the blackboard and the person drawing was STILL telling the person writing what to write. So the next class I decided I would draw and would pick one person from each team to write and whoever wrote it first got a point, still a little noisy because the rest of the team could help, but it worked much better. Finally I settled on me starting as drawer with two pre-selected writers for each round and the person who won that round would get to draw the next time. I guess 5th time is the charm, or maybe each group of kids is just different. Probably some of both.
The weirdest thing was that at the end of class all the kids ran up to the front with their English books and wanted my autograph. I still don't understand it, but almost every class did it.
There was also this woman teacher who asked me to call her Judy who doted on me so much it was almost annoying. When I would come into the office between classes, she would tell me to sit down and if I would say I didn't want to she would stand there insisting that I sit until I did. Whenever my water bottle got low she would ask to fill it up and I would say "No that's ok" or "I still have a little left" or "I can do it myself" she would just say "No, I will help you" and take it away and fill it up. Then at the end of the day she walked with me all the way to where the other guy was waiting with the car to take me to Chengdu at one of the gates of the school grounds even though I assured her many times I knew where it was and that I would be fine. She was scared I would get lost (hard to do).
But everyone was really nice and the kids were all really fun and I am excited to come back next time, when I have a day full of 1st graders. Through this experience I did learn that I do not want to be a teacher, but I am having a good time right now and I am really glad I decided to do it. Plus I made 500 kuai in a day which I can live off of for a good couple weeks.
That's all the exciting news for now. School is still school. We started some more classes this week; another, different, History and Culture class with a really good professor and a really interesting book ("Understanding China" by John Bryan Starr; much better, easier read than the last "Governing China" book for those of you who didn't make it through...ahem) and a News Listening class that will just be really helpful because of all the vocabulary. Alot of the things they talk about on the news are very patterned and they use alot of fancy, non-colloquial words that you just have to learn in order to understand what is going on at all, so hopefully the class will be really helpful too. Next week we also start our Women in China class with Pang Laoshi (one of the woman teachers of the SU-UW exchange program) which I am really excited about and should be really interesting. Plus Pang Laoshi is a really cool lady and I think she will be a really good teacher.
Have a happy weekend and I'll talk to you all again soon. Cheers!