First day of class

I had my first day of classes on Friday. I had two in the morning, both of about 45 or 50 students. The first one goes from 8 to 9:30, and the second from 9:40 to 11:10. We get one 10 minute break in the middle of each class.

I introduced myself and then asked them a few questions. All the students in those two classes are in their third year of school and they're all in the three year program. This is actually their last semester of classes, since they'll be using next semester to find jobs. Very few of them are from Xinyu although almost all of them are from Jiangxi province, which is where Xinyu is. Most of the students are around 20 or 21 years old, with a few 19-year-olds and one or two who are 22. I asked them about last year's classes, what they liked and didn't like, and had them start working on coming up with introduction presentations for next week's class.

I have nine total classes, all in the morning. Seven are general oral English and two are business English. Each class meets once per week and I'm guessing each one will have around 50 students. So I have a lot of students whom I'm not going to see that often.

After teaching I went to lunch and ran into a couple students from my class. They walked with me as I went around looking at what was being served. Just walking around wasn't that easy though because the cafeteria was a madhouse of freshmen running around in their blue camo crowding the windows to get some food. The cafeteria has a bunch of windows with different dishes and you have to fight your way to the front of a window, point at something, and hand them what look like poker chips that you get at the entrance in exchange for cash. The chaos is intimidating but the food was pretty good.

As I was waiting for the school bus back to the old campus that afternoon, I got a few pictures of the freshmen cadets.





I haven't done much this weekend but I did meet with another teacher named Romeo to ask him about teaching strategies. He's from the Philippines and has been teaching for close to 20 years. He's been teaching in China for the past 6 years and this is his second year in Xinyu. I asked him last night if we could meet sometime and he suggested we go out to lunch today. We walked to a restaurant he knew of, talked about teaching and the Philippines, and talked some about tennis. He's been playing for, I think, about a year and we're going to try to hit some this week. I also had dog meat for the first time. It was very good, some of the best meat I've had here. A lot of the meat I've had here so far was almost all bone and fat but the dog meat was lean and it wasn't served with a bunch of bones.

I have two classes tomorrow so I'm going to work on some lesson plans now.