It's been a busy 10 days! Last week was my first full week of classes, minus my Friday course which will begin once the freshmen have completed their mandatory military training. Classes are going well! My text book is surprisingly helpful with video and audio examples. It also contains English/Chinese character vocab sections for easier translation of advanced words. My students just laugh and laugh as the beads of frustration roll down my face when it takes me 3 minutes to write one character, but they understand so I can only laugh too!
This past Monday I entered the terrible two's, 22 that is. A group of us foreign teachers went into Chongqing on Saturday night to celebrate. After catching a bus into not quite the right part of town we wandered around a bit until a sign from the heavens struck us all. BIG PIZZA! I've never heard the Hallelujah choir sing so brightly. So after our treat of pizza and other Western food we met up with some peace corp volunteers and other teachers and danced the night away! On Monday I received a cake from the foreign teachers office which was shared by many on our apartment rooftop. And although the cake was non dairy and had a similar texture to styrofoam it was decorated exquisitely - covered with fruit and chocolate and of course tomatoes! But hey, cake is cake!
I have also decided to enjoy the life a student once again and take up an elementary Mandarin course! It's very humbling actually because all of the things we teachers complain about (students putting their heads down when asked to participate, giggling when speaking or when others are speaking, etc) is exactly what's happening to us in class. Touché China.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Monday, September 6, 2010
First Day of Class!
Do you remember that gitty/slightly nervous/anxious/excited feeling for the first day of school? Well multiply that times 10, throw in a pinch of uneasiness and about a gallon and a half of sweat and you've got my first class. Ok ok, it wasn't that bad, and although the sweat wasn't really an exaggeration, I'm blaming most of that on the 20+ minute walk and humidity. Anyways the students are really great and I think it'll be a fun class.
I took one step into the classroom and immediately there were oohs and ahhs and then a full applause! I was shocked! I couldn't help but smile, and if my hair hadn't been trying to afro its way back to the 70's, I almost would have felt glamorous. I started the class with an introduction of myself and then gave them the basic outline of the course. I then had the students write down a little paragraph about themselves so that I could learn more about each of them as well as judge where their English skills were. We then played a get to know the teacher game which started out with me writing a few words about myself on the board: Yaqui, 21, Kylie, 9, sand, and banana. The students then had to ask yes/no questions to try and figure out how each word related to me. My street name (Yaqui) was thought to be my boyfriend's name, and they thought that either bananas were famous in Arizona or that I'd like to buy the class a round of bananas. Sorry, but the banana was simply my breakfast of choice this morning. We finished up the class rather early which got me another thunderous round of applause! I could get used to this.
The class consisted of 55 students of which only 10 were men. Most of the students are from the Sichuan province but there were a few from neighboring provinces and one young woman from Tibet. Their energy and eagerness is contagious and I'm very much looking forward to teaching them all they want to know about English and the United States.
I took one step into the classroom and immediately there were oohs and ahhs and then a full applause! I was shocked! I couldn't help but smile, and if my hair hadn't been trying to afro its way back to the 70's, I almost would have felt glamorous. I started the class with an introduction of myself and then gave them the basic outline of the course. I then had the students write down a little paragraph about themselves so that I could learn more about each of them as well as judge where their English skills were. We then played a get to know the teacher game which started out with me writing a few words about myself on the board: Yaqui, 21, Kylie, 9, sand, and banana. The students then had to ask yes/no questions to try and figure out how each word related to me. My street name (Yaqui) was thought to be my boyfriend's name, and they thought that either bananas were famous in Arizona or that I'd like to buy the class a round of bananas. Sorry, but the banana was simply my breakfast of choice this morning. We finished up the class rather early which got me another thunderous round of applause! I could get used to this.
The class consisted of 55 students of which only 10 were men. Most of the students are from the Sichuan province but there were a few from neighboring provinces and one young woman from Tibet. Their energy and eagerness is contagious and I'm very much looking forward to teaching them all they want to know about English and the United States.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Settling In
Ni hao!
Slowly but surely I'm getting settled in to my apartment and adjusting to the fact that I now live in China! This week we've been touring Beibei and the Southwest University campus as well as exploring sites of Chongqing.
Yesterday we spent the whole day in Chongqing seeing all the sights. We went to the three gorges museum which is pretty cool, visited their equivalent of a parliament hall or central government building, and saw the point where the Jialing and Yangtze rivers meet. Then we went to two different places with a whole bunch of shops, but the exteriors of the places were designed like the old towns and ancient villages, it was very cool. I bought a brush painting of chinese plum blossoms to decorate my apartment. We then went to a beautiful restaurant to have hot pot! Ok so hot pot is like fondue where you have a giant pot of boiling liquid and you cook meat and vegetables in it. Traditionally, hot pot is very spicy but they have half and half pots where one side is the red spices and the other more of a broth. The meat selections were beef, sheep, cow stomach, chicken stomach, chicken noodles, beef meatballs, and sausages. The veggies were mushrooms, lotus root, potatos, chinese root (they couldn't translate it), rice noodles, sweet potato noodles, black fungus, white fungus, and probably a few other things I don't know the name of. Anyways everyone would just sort of dump a bunch of stuff into both the hot and mild side and you let it cook for a few minutes and then dip it in either a sesame oil or spicy soy sauce and enjoy! And we did enjoy :) Now if the spices didn't numb your mouth and make you sweat enough as it is, our director bought a 220 RMB bottle of baijiu, which we had to COMPLETELY FINISH before we could get beer. Baijiu is a distilled liquor made from rice; most baijiu is around 80-120 proof. It's not very good, but the more expensive the bottle the more tolerable it gets. So, eight shots later, we're all feeling pretty nice. We'll probably go out again for hot pot for my birthday, and it'll be very nice for the winter months.
Today April, one of the assistants in the international exchange office, gave me my teaching schedule and showed me the buildings and classrooms I will be teaching in, which begins on Monday! Most of my classes will have over 60 students in them but their English skills should be fairly high. I will also be teaching at a technical college in Chongqing on Thursday mornings. I'm excited and nervous to start teaching but I've already met a few students and they are all very eager and excited to use and practice English, so that'll help.
I'm still figuring out a way to post pictures. I can't directly post them into the blog for reasons unknown but hopefully album links will be coming soon.
Zaijian!
Slowly but surely I'm getting settled in to my apartment and adjusting to the fact that I now live in China! This week we've been touring Beibei and the Southwest University campus as well as exploring sites of Chongqing.
Yesterday we spent the whole day in Chongqing seeing all the sights. We went to the three gorges museum which is pretty cool, visited their equivalent of a parliament hall or central government building, and saw the point where the Jialing and Yangtze rivers meet. Then we went to two different places with a whole bunch of shops, but the exteriors of the places were designed like the old towns and ancient villages, it was very cool. I bought a brush painting of chinese plum blossoms to decorate my apartment. We then went to a beautiful restaurant to have hot pot! Ok so hot pot is like fondue where you have a giant pot of boiling liquid and you cook meat and vegetables in it. Traditionally, hot pot is very spicy but they have half and half pots where one side is the red spices and the other more of a broth. The meat selections were beef, sheep, cow stomach, chicken stomach, chicken noodles, beef meatballs, and sausages. The veggies were mushrooms, lotus root, potatos, chinese root (they couldn't translate it), rice noodles, sweet potato noodles, black fungus, white fungus, and probably a few other things I don't know the name of. Anyways everyone would just sort of dump a bunch of stuff into both the hot and mild side and you let it cook for a few minutes and then dip it in either a sesame oil or spicy soy sauce and enjoy! And we did enjoy :) Now if the spices didn't numb your mouth and make you sweat enough as it is, our director bought a 220 RMB bottle of baijiu, which we had to COMPLETELY FINISH before we could get beer. Baijiu is a distilled liquor made from rice; most baijiu is around 80-120 proof. It's not very good, but the more expensive the bottle the more tolerable it gets. So, eight shots later, we're all feeling pretty nice. We'll probably go out again for hot pot for my birthday, and it'll be very nice for the winter months.
Today April, one of the assistants in the international exchange office, gave me my teaching schedule and showed me the buildings and classrooms I will be teaching in, which begins on Monday! Most of my classes will have over 60 students in them but their English skills should be fairly high. I will also be teaching at a technical college in Chongqing on Thursday mornings. I'm excited and nervous to start teaching but I've already met a few students and they are all very eager and excited to use and practice English, so that'll help.
I'm still figuring out a way to post pictures. I can't directly post them into the blog for reasons unknown but hopefully album links will be coming soon.
Zaijian!
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