When I was a kid I used to whinge at my mother, who was a teacher in her former life, every time she came home from schoo tired: she’d stagger in, cook dinner, drink a glass of wine, collapse onto the sofa and nod off before the Simpsons had finished. Mum’s school was like a lunatic asaylum and consequently the nodding off routine used to occur on a fairly regular basis - I don’t know why it used to bother me so much since being a teenager at the time I was terrible company and didn’t want to speak to her anyway, but I used to complain about it endlessly. I didn’t understand why a day in the classroom would tire her out more than me.

I’ve now been teaching third grade – 9 year old – Chinese kids for a total of two weeks (10 days to be precise) and my views have altered somewhat: it’s a wonder to me that my mother even made it home awake let alone cooking dinner and lasting for 6 minutes of a 24 minute episode. I only have to do 24 lessons per week and I’ve lapsed into a state of extreme mental and physical exhaustion, catching forty winks here and there on my way to work and hiding in the toilets between lessons to collect myself for the next onslaught.

I started my teaching life a week last Monday at the Beijing Foreign Language School, along with eleven other new English teachers and, in true Chinese style, we were given our teaching syllabus forty eight hours before we started teaching, so I spent a fraught weekend last weekend trying to write lesson plans. As it turned out I needn’t have bothered because they’d given me the wrong syllabus, so I had to wing it all day Monday. Fun. The school is a big place – 1200 students of which I teach eight third grade classes: my main worry before I turned up getting my head around lots of Chinese names, but apparently all the kids are allowed to choose an English name that they use in their language lessons. You’d think this would make things more straightforward but the names range from the sublime to the ridiculous, and in one class I have John, Richard, Kelly, Billy, Wish, Glory, Vera, Dragon, Tiger, Hamster 1, Hamster 2 and Hamster 3. I’m having trouble remembering which one is Hamster 1 and which one is Hamster 2, but luckily Hamster 3 bears a striking resemblance to a desert rodent, so I usually get his name right.

I’m fast learning that kids see their English lessons with the foreign teachers as a bit of a break from the drudgery of other classes, so the order of the day is games, songs and lots of chatter. The students are almost without exception bright and enthusiastic, but some of them can be the devil incarnate if they fancy it  - if you have images of identical, well-behaved, silent little Chinese kids reciting comprehensions, think again – most of my classes are organised carnage (’Simon Says’ can get particularly raucus, especially if you make the mistake, as I did, of including ‘Simon says act like a monkey’ as one of your actions…I’m waiting for an invoice for the classroom repairs after that one). The school itself is a specialist foreign language school so my kids, at nine, have been learning English for at least three years and they can chatter away quite happily, in some cases more than I would like them to.

So, as you can gather, after seven months of bumming around doing an actual job has come as a bit of a shock, particularly one as demanding as teaching. Having been accustomed to getting up at 7.30am, ish, for a leisurely breakfast cooked by somebody else followed by some sightseeing to break upthe morning, my alarm now goes off at 5.45am and I have breakfast at the subway station on the way. Chinese schools work a long, long week: the kids get there at 7.30am and lessons kick off at eight, but some of them have a P.E class before that. The teachers get a break at 8.40am when the kids go out for half an hour of military-style exercises and flag raising, then it’s more lessons through to lunchtime, then lessons again until 5.25pm, so they’re lucky to get home before six every evening. Most of them seem to do English lessons or some sort of private tuition on Saturdays and Sundays as well. And next week, when they get a few days off to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of communism in China (the country’s most significant public holiday), guess what? They have to come in at the weekend to make up for the lost time with extra lessons. No wonder China is taking over the world’s economy; from the age of five its children are indoctrinated to work, work, work.

Having said all this, most days it’s pretty good fun and I’m learning as much Chinese as they’re learning English, not to mention conquering my long-held fear of children. There are quite a few I still don;t trust though, it’s that funny little glint in their eye.

Rugby and football training started this week so I’ve finally started to do some proper exercise again and we have our first rugby match in four weeks time, so settling in to Beijing nicely all in all. Shamefully, we’ve still yet to do any sightseeing in or around the city, but we’re saving Tiannamen Square for the 60th Anniverary celebrations, which promise to be absolutely immense: they had a practice there last week and 200,000 people turned up just to watch.

Right, I must go, James will have his apron on to cook my dinner but I’ve got one more class first – no hamsters in this one.