Kunshan International School - American Program

We started our new teacher orientation on Monday with the American Program at Kunshan International School. Including the two of us, there are five new teachers in the program, which is a significant number considering there are only about 15 teachers total. Just a brief background of the school:

I'm not sure how long the International School has been around but it's basically just a Chinese private school that hires a few foreigners to teach English. That alone gives it the right to call itself Kunshan International School or KSIS for short (in Chinese, Kunshan is actually written as two separate characters and sometimes that translates to English: 昆山 = Kun Shan). Except for the English classes, the curriculum is entirely in Chinese and its a Chinese style of education. I wont get into how that differs from Western education, but just know that schools here operate very differently. At some point, the idea was brought up to have a true Western style program within the International School, complete with a full English curriculum and all Western teachers. The idea is to prepare students who wish to attend universities in the US, Europe, Australia, etc. With that, KSIS-AP was born in 2010. There is a diverse population of students from Taiwan, Korea, China, Singapore, and Indonesia, as well as one or two Western countries. All students are required to take an English test prior to admittance so, in theory, all students will speak pretty good English. The teacher demographic is even more diverse with the countries of the United States, Canada, Colombia, Spain, Russia and the UK being represented. As for the campus itself, there is a separate wing of KSIS for our program and we operate almost entirely independent from the International School. The program has been very successful since its inception and was actually granted independence from KSIS for the 2012-2013 school year. It became known simply as Kunshan American School. Recently however,"the powers at be," as our director likes to call them, decided the school should rejoin the International School, once again to be called KSIS-AP. In addition, we will no longer be accepting elementary/middle school students. Our youngest group is in second grade this year and as they progress through school we will just no longer have those grade levels. When they become freshmen, we will continue strictly as a high school program. Our director's theory is that we were 'stealing' elementary applicants from the International School. Apparently the waiting list to get into KSIS has been greatly reduced since the American Program has done so well. Nobody likes an ego blow. 

So as I stated before, we started our new teacher orientation this week. It has been a pretty relaxed week where we mostly went over school procedures and received more details about our teaching assignments. Chelsea will be teaching 4th grade and I will be teaching high school English. I will have at least four courses to teach: English I, English II, American Literature, and British literature, one for each respective grade level. There is a possibility I will pick up a fifth course but that is not yet clear. Our current big task is to come up with course outlines for each of our classes. As a guide, we were given outlines that previous teachers have used but the director of the American Program really wants us to make the courses our own. We can even use whatever standards we want, as long as they come from an accredited institution. He gave us the link to the Washington State public education standards, but said we can use others if we want. For instance, I could use the TEKS from Texas if I wanted. It's nice to be given so much freedom but it also puts a lot of pressure on us to come up with our own material. We will both be working on our outlines over the weekend and throughout next week. 

On Friday we took a "field trip" into Shanghai with the director and a few of the returning teachers who are already back in town. Apparently they do this every year as a team building type activity and to help everyone get more acquainted. First we went to the Chinese History museum which had a ton of cool artifacts from thousands of years ago. We then had a delicious family style lunch at one of our directors favorite restaurants. Most traditional Chinese restaurants operate this way: you just order a few entrees and a few sides and everyone shares everything. It's a great way to try lots of different food. After lunch we headed downtown to the observation deck of the tallest building in the city, The Shanghai Financial Center. Although its only the 5th or 6th tallest building in the world, it holds the world record for the highest observation deck. Right next door, the Shanghai Tower is nearing completion and will be the second tallest in the world. We could see construction workers walking around on platforms 100+ stories in the air! After the observation deck, we headed back to Kunshan - unfortunately during rush hour. 18 million people all leaving work at the same time does not make for a good commute. The normally 30 minute trip took us well over 3 hours on the way home. We would normally take the high speed train to and from Shanghai, but I guess with a group of 11 they thought it would be more cost effective to hire a bus driver. 

By the time we got home it was around 8:30 and we were a little tired. But this is the last weekend of the Kunshan International Beer Festival and we have both really been wanting to go. So we took the bus to downtown Kunshan to check it out. It wasn't quite what we expected but we had fun. We tried beers from Germany, Czech Republic, Taiwan, and China. We also got a pretty good Chinese version of German sausage and sauerkraut. By 10 or so we were all Beer-Fested out and took a cab home. We're planning on having a pretty tame weekend to work on our course outlines and prepare for the week. On Monday we start our in service with the entire staff, then the following Monday is when school will start! We're looking forward to a great year!

As always, thanks for reading,

Hunter

The front of the KSIS building. The American Program is basically the whole 4th floor. All the dorms and other buildings are behind this one. 

We went to the top of the building with the hole in the middle. The Shanghai Tower is the one to the right that's under construction. It will be significantly taller than the Financial Center. 

Inside the financial center they had this really cool model of the city. The model includes a rendition of what the final Shanghai tower will look like. 

A few pics from the observation deck. Shanghai is definitely clearer than Beijing but you can still see a fair amount of haze and smog. 

A few pictures of Kunshan City Park. There are lots of parks and nature areas around Kunshan. We've only explored this one so far but want to check out more.