You may not be Kobe Bryant but you're OK

I walked into the schoolroom in Wuwei county, Anhui province, not having the slightest clue what to expect.

I'd joined the Summer Service Learning Project at Tsinghua University for an adventure, to experience a chunk of China I hadn't seen before. Through the program, small groups of Tsinghua students, six or seven, along with a few international volunteers, are assigned to rural regions in China for a two-week summer stint volunteer teaching English.

Some of the assignments are truly rural, in the hinterlands of Gansu province, the Ningxia Hui and Guangxi Zhuang autonomous regions, and Qinghai province, where chalk is the only classroom technology. Others, like my assignment, are in outposts far removed from the speed and sparkle of China's first-tier cities.