I've been in China for a Little While

After returning from vacation back to my apartment and classes I've started to feel like I really do live here in China. Everything has begun to feel a lot more routine. Even my kabob-gobbling frenzy has died down to nearly-reasonable levels. I stay a lot busier on campus and make less runs into town. I've booked out Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday night for getting tutored and Wednesday night for helping the oral English club with "English corner"--basically extra spoken English practice for first-years. Teaching five sections of the same class does help a bit in terms of time spent planning.

I've felt like my classes have been a bit lacking so far. Though my Maryknoll Coordinator told me I did a good job after sitting through one of them (which was encouraging), I still feel like I need to come up with a bigger variety of ideas. As the course is Scientific English I do a lot of articles and discussion questions and throw in some more general English practice activities as well. The class goes pretty well most days in terms of getting people to speak English though I think that the students' past foreign teachers have made class a great deal more fun and exciting. The students want games and movies all of the time and I've done just a little bit of each so far. Informal taboo/catchphrase can be astounding for getting almost every student to speak a lot of English, the beauty is that the game loses it's fun if they aren't speaking in English. We haven't found anything else that does the trick quite so elegantly. If you're ever playing a game that heavily involves language use and you think I could possibly adapt it to English teaching, let me know.

I one of the things I've done is to pretty much ditch the textbook. Chinese textbooks seem to be whatever assembly of articles relating to the given subject which the editors could get away with paying the lowest royalties for. My textbook is a bunch of articles of random articles varying from Bill Gates' speech at Tsinghua University sometime in the late nineties to dated articles about the "future of the Internet" which are far less than relevant today and not even up to speed with the date of publishing (2001). My friend James teaches "Legal English" with a textbook containing at least a couple of chapters lifted straight from Wikipedia.

The Chinese is coming along slowly, I just added a second tutor and am now being tutored four times a week. Meeting with tutors is especially good as it encourages more studying, I'm a long way from conversational but I guess it's a good sign that I've begun involuntarily thinking about Chinese in my mind.

Other than that, I'm bracing for the winter.