"The whole country washes to colour the catena headquarters"

I don't know what the title of the post means but I read it on a shop sign in town and thought it catchy.


Teaching is going pretty well. It's difficult to plan classes that keep the whole class engaged for 2 hours when they are at such different skill and (especially) motivation levels, especially when there are 45 people. Overall though my students are pretty great. Most of them have more understanding than they let on (they have very restrained classroom habits) and are interested in learning to be more fluent. The job description I was given was something like "you will teach scientific english, here is your textbook". The textbook is not the best, so if anyone has neat short articles on science they think I could use send them my way (think 6th grade reading level, unless the article is very short). The students are especially interested in computers, cell phones, the internet, business technology, and the environment. A couple approached me after class on Monday to ask me about special relativity so we had great fun going through the bit that I remember from high school physics.


I'm realizing it is my third week and I have not yet done anything formally with my students outside of class, though I see and talk to them everywhere around campus and even in town. I head out shopping for electronics (phone, camera) though with a group of guys from one of my classes soon ("a group of guys" pretty much means all the males in the class, over 90% of English majors at colleges like this one are women). Life is still very social though, and I (often along with other Maryknollers) seem to always be meeting up with friends from somewhere in the world, occasionally riding there in a hilarious taxi that I won't talk about until I can get a picture. The thing would be illegal for so many reasons back in the States. My friend Ashley (from Korea) has this driver in her phone and calls the outrageous cab to drive her everywhere.


Anyway I've been learning more Chinese than last time I came. It helps to have studied it before, especially for the headstart on pronunciation. It also helps emmensely to be in a region where local pronunciation is far closer to the standard Mandarin which is being taught. The Chinese are very interested and welcoming toward foreigners, which adds to the incentive to learn the language. For example two monks delightedly belted questions at me after sitting me down in their shop the other day, spraying me with the cucumber they were eating the whole time. Taxi drivers and street vendors whom I buy things from also want to make lots of conversation, and many of the foreign students speak much more Chinese than English, so I get a bit of practice. The hardest thing though is to sit and study characters, the first few are great fun, but it's a slower way to learn foreign vocabulary than I'm used to.