Birmingham and Surrey

After finishing work with ELAC, I was offered another summer camp job with a different firm (who shall remain nameless, but who definitely lived up to the summer camp stereotypes!).

On the way down to Surrey, I stayed overnight in Birmingham and met up with Tunde from my CELTA course who was teaching at Birmingham Uni over the summer. She definitely had a cushier job, teaching for about 12 hours a week for much more money, but then again, she does have years of experience teaching adults! We went out for some food and had a good catch up.

I arrived in Surrey on the Monday to find everything in chaos awaiting the new students arrival. I waited at the station for about an hour for someone to pick me up and there wasn't a bedroom ready for me. In the end, another teacher and me just went to find a room and picked one that looked as if it wasn't being used! As the camp was at a boarding school rather than a university or college, most of the rooms were shared (luckily all the staff were given single rooms the next day) and didn't have locks, so I had to lock all my valuables in my suitcase and hope for the best.

The camp was expecting around 200 Chinese students aged between 10 and 12 for 2 weeks. The teachers were expected to teach for 3 hours a day and do activities for 6 hours a day, a pretty hefty workload, especially with staff meetings on top. The Course Leader was a deeply unpleasant man and was pretty much unprepared for the new students. The students were not streamed according to ability and I ended up with one class of 30 students ranging from complete beginners to Intermediate! One of the teachers lasted a week then quit and I lasted about a week and a half... not a great experience!