The brief for my first English teaching gig could not have sounded sweeter. I was to give a 30-minute lesson to a group of 2-year-olds in a bilingual kindergarten in an upscale part of Beijing. Instead, I ended up with 30 mature-aged budding astronauts singing along to an obscure kids' nursery rhyme at a corporate language class their company had organized.

The call to teach the businessmen had come out of the blue, a couple of weeks before I was due to start the plush job I had landed at the kindergarten. Suddenly, I found myself in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven car, rushing to a company somewhere on the other side of town.

I would be standing in as instructor for a group learning spoken English as part of their job as aeronautical engineers. Never having been the scholarly type, I hadn't pegged myself as a teacher before the kindergarten job came up.

I thought hanging out with 2-year-olds would be fun, but astronauts-in-training?

This new assignment was particularly daunting, as my preparation for a career in education had to this point involved collecting colored crayons for the kids, and consulting over the phone with mom to brush up on the lyrics to the nursery rhymes I'd grown up with in country Australia.

No scope for curriculum overlap with this new situation, I thought.

My panic rose when I arrived at the complex to find rows of earnest pupils, dressed in sober suits and already seated expectantly before a blackboard. I wouldn't call myself shy, but at that moment I felt more nervous than I'd ever been. I began to sweat and struggled to string a sentence together.

"Oh, so what do you want to talk about?" I said. Silence. Eyes averted. Feet shuffled beneath desks. Then, finally, one of the more outgoing members of class offered: "You lecture us for two hours."

I fell back on a spiel about my hometown, and luckily it seemed there were some swimming fans out there. "Oh, Ian Thorpe!" came the approving cry, creating a ripple of appreciation. Deciding to milk the Down Under connection, I turned to the yet unused blackboard.

"Sydney Harbour," I scrawled on the slate. So far, so good. The eager students copied down the letters before downing pens. Soon, I felt 30 pairs of eyes upon me again. Several seconds passed, then came the strategic coughing. Up went my missing Woops. We got on a roll chatting about sports, and I began to relax as I went from desk to desk having a chin wag with each of my students.

Small talk exhausted, I stole a quick glance at my watch, and struggled to contain a shocked gasp. Still 45 minutes to go! Racking my brains as the minutes drew longer, finally a faint tune found its way into my consciousness.

I rallied the troops for a good, old-fashioned sing-a-long. "Down by the station, early in the morning. See the little puffin' billys all in a row..."

The nursery rhyme saved the day, and the company was none the wiser. To my amazement, they asked me to come back and teach again. But I think I'm more on the level with 2-year-olds.

(China Daily 11/02/2007 page20)