I'm a TV Star!!

Okay, Okay, I know what you're thinking: "Rachel, be logical here. One interview on local television does not a TV star make."

But then I will respond with the fact that I'm American, and I was interviewed for a local television channel, which makes me not merely a TV star but an international TV star.

And then you will stop trying to use your logic on me and will just let me do my happy dance in blissful ignorance of reality.

Basically, what happened was, a few weeks ahead of time, we were informed that the local television station wanted to feature us on their news program--they were interested on doing a story on the lifestyle of foreigners teaching English in ShenZhen, China.

The journalists came to our school one morning and spent the morning videotaping our classes. Angel wasn't actually scheduled to teach that morning, and was only informed that he had to teach for the cameras 10 minutes ahead of time, so he borrowed a class from another teacher, one that he'd already taught that week, and didn't have a completely new lesson prepared for them, so he had them play a version of charades where the students verbally describe a word they are trying to get their classmates to guess.

The students were very excited about having cameras in their classroom and a few were even pulled out during class in order to be interviewed about their experience of having Angel and I as English conversation teachers.

They filmed individual interviews with us in our office (our own desks weren't quite suitable for the filming, so they kicked a couple of our coworkers out of their desks). They also filmed us 'lesson planning' together and walking to our classes together. They were particularly interested on catching the touching moment as we separate and head two different ways, as we teach in completely different buildings. They had us re-enact the point in our walk where we separate multiple times, but I'm not sure if we did it good enough that that clip will even make it into the interview.

 Our interview questions. Just as a help for those not experienced with non-native English, #1 is asking about our previous work experience and #11 is asking how Angel and I met. I thought those two were the trickiest ones.

Also, this is how you know everything on tv is fake: Angel wore his suit coat and a tie to teach in--he may, on rare occasions, wear the tie, but never a suit coat. I also pushed things to the extreme and taught in heels. Which may have been a bad idea because Angel said afterwards, "Whoa, those heels look really pretty! Why don't you wear them more often?"

It was funny how we both responded differently to the cameras. I was on such an adrenaline high that I had a hard time sleeping and then eating breakfast before the interview, though when the cameras were on me I was perfectly comfortable. Angel, on the other hand, didn't show that the thought of being on TV made any impression on him whatsoever until he was in the classroom a minute before class began and turned to me and said, "Why do I feel so nervous?" He was definitely a little uncomfortable in front of the cameras, but I was very proud of how well he did.

If we do end up getting a copy of the aired segment, I will post it online and share with you guys! We don't actually have any television service...or a television, and there's no guarantee that we'll see our segment when it airs (though they have told us that they will give us a disk of the segment), but I wanted to write own the story of this fun little adventure while it was still fresh in my mind.