What it do my peoples

Hey hey! Mr. Destructo here bringin the funk straight to your eyeholes.

Things are still crazy to the max here, but I'm dealing pretty well. I'm teaching two sections of a "General" Music class, and two sections of Health. That's right, I'm a health teacher. Take a second and let your brain absorb that. I'll remind you once more, a health teacher. That sure as hell threw me for a loop. I'm still trying to figure out what my curriculum is going to be because, oh yeah, I don't have a book to teach out of. It's just me, deciding what to tell these kids about what's what on staying healthy. I couldn't think of a better person to do it, really.

For the last week I've been teaching out of the conference room instead of my own room for a number of reasons:
1) As of Friday, there were only chairs in my room. Before that, there was nothing.
2) On Wednesday (the day before classes started) at around 1pm, our partner school (who owns the building we inhabit) decided that it was not in our contract to have the 4th floor (the floor that houses my classroom). So on Wednesday and Thursday my class was homeless. The higher-ups negotiated only my room on the 4th floor back into our contract on Friday (yay), but because of the lack of teaching things, I remain in the conference room.
3) All of the other classrooms belong to other teachers, so I've been moving my class around occasionally into other classrooms with projectors in order to teach.
4) I'm a health teacher. That doesn't have anything to do with why I'm teaching in the conference room. I just thought I'd remind you.

My co-workers seem pretty cool. It's way different than Kodai last year. People are not nearly as kind and welcoming, which I've decided is because everyone is so stressed. Also, they aren't all Christians, and it's a different kind of expat who lives in China than India. I've made friends with the younger staff and they've been nice enough to take me out for a couple meals.

I finally came up with a plan for my brand-spankin-new music program today. I discovered that most kids that brought their own instruments brought guitars, with spattering of violins and flutes. Not exactly band fodder. So my plan is to teach lesson after school for the next nine weeks during their activity time. This may sound like a fairly simple "plan", but believe you me, with all of the fairly f-ed up scheduling at this school, that was a stroke of genius on my part.

I'm kind of out in the boonies as far as Beijing goes, but I don't mind it. The air quality is actually not that bad (it's apparently a LOT better for the Olympics). I went and walked around Olympic park last night with a few co-workers. The stadiums are pretty incredible up close. My camera still doesn't have batteries in it, but Klara took pictures and said she'd send them around. I think I'm gonna take a chinese class over in the international school area so I can a) learn chinese and b) hopefully make friends with some of the international crowd in Beijing (this was suggested by Luke, a co-worker). I'm planning on setting up my bike soon so I can tool around the city and not have to spend money on taxis all the time.

So far Beijing is pretty dope. I've had a few "what the hell am I doing here" moments of stress mostly due to the chaos that is dissipating around this new music program. But this weekend I got hit with that feeling since I moved here so I could conduct a band, and that seemed to be uncertain. But things are looking up. Also, no one speaks english outside of the school. This is getting to me more than I thought it would, which is another reason I want to learn chinese. I'll stop it there for now. I miss you guys more than I thought I would. Hit me with an email or something so I can read something in english. It would almost surely save my life.

Peace and Hair Grease,

Mr. D