Monday nights

My neighbor, Xiao Yong, teaches educational technology at the university. Calligraphy is a hobby of his and one night a couple weeks ago I happened to see him practicing in his room. I told him I was interested in calligraphy and he offered for me to join him once a week to practice. So for the past two Monday nights I've gone across the hall at around 7:30 and Xiao Yong has taught me how to "xie" characters. "Xie" translates as "to write" although it seems to me like its closer to painting or drawing. Whatever it is, drawing, painting, or writing, I'm practicing calligraphy with Xiao Yong on Monday nights and on my own sometimes as well.

Hiking, Cathy

There are two rivers that run through the east and south sides of Xinyu and a small mountain range borders the city on the north. It's only about a 15 minute walk to the foot of the mountains from my apartment so today, after I ate some lunch, I walked to the hiking trail. After hiking for about 15 minutes I came to a large monument. I don't know the history behind the monument but I do know that it translates as "martyrs' monument", similar to the park I walked around in Guangzhou.


The trail continued on past the monument and I hiked up it for a while. It was quite cloudy today so I didn't get any great views of the city but the air was cool and good for hiking.



I went back home and at three this afternoon I met Cathy. Cathy is a junior at the No.4 high school (where Bobby also goes). Her mother teaches English at Xinyu College and her father teaches Chinese poetry. Her family also lives in the apartment complex so I met her at the gate where we get on the bus in the morning to go to school. She took me to a park near a big sports complex in the north-east part of the city and we walked around there for a while.

Among other things, we talked about her school. The No. 4 middle and high school is one of the two best schools in Xinyu and the students there work very long hours. They have class in the morning from eight to eleven or twelve. Then lunch. Then class again from two to five. Then more class after dinner for another couple hours, as well as class on Saturday mornings and afternoons and on Sunday nights (and possibly Sunday afternoons). She and Bobby have both told me that they and other students have always been under a lot of pressure to study hard, get into a good high school and then get into a good college.

But school wasn't the only thing we talked about. Cathy also informed me that she really likes sweets and comic books. So we stopped at a cafe in the park to get some ice cream. Afterwords we took a cab back towards the old campus and got some dumplings for dinner. And on the way back from dinner to the old campus she showed me a good comic book store.

I went with her to her home and met her mother, father, and grandmother and she showed me various things in her room including her foreign currency collection, some photographs, and her sketchbook containing all her comic-style sketches. Her drawings really were very good. It seems I will be meeting with her this year on weekends since that's the only time when she's free.

On Friday afternoon I went for a walk through 北湖公园 (Beihu Gongyuan, "North Lake Park"). As I was walking back home I came across a crowd of people who were watching a group of Chinese girls playing the 古琴 (guqin), which is like a Chinese harp that is played while sitting down and lays flat across a stand.


There's a music school right where they were playing and they were putting on a performance for their parents. One group of students would play a song or two and then another group would come on. There was a group of younger students, girls who I guess were all about eight or nine years, who weren't playing when I got there and they took an interest in me as I was standing there watching.


I watched the music for a while and then continued on home. I had been walking for a couple minutes when I heard two of the girls running to catch up with me. I stopped and waited for them and when they reached me they asked if I would come back the following afternoon to watch them play again. I said I might and they ran away laughing.

On Friday night we all got on the bus at 6:30 and went back to campus for the Teacher's Day celebration. After some speeches were made by various faculty the student performances began. Lots of singing (mostly pop music), some traditional and contemporary dances, a martial arts exhibition, a comedy act, Chinese classical music, and an interpretive dance about some event from the early days of the Communist Party.




The teachers sat in the first few rows and all the students sat behind us and stood to the side to watch. The freshman trainees were sitting right behind myself and Bleisha, another English teacher from the Philippines who arrived here on Thursday. They were all wearing their camo still and doing lots of whooping whenever a performance involved girls dancing or wearing any tight clothing.

The performance ended around 10 and all the teachers got back on the school bus and came back to the old campus.

Before going back to see the girls play music yesterday afternoon, I went to get my first haircut in China. It was much better than the haircuts I've gotten at places in the US. One guy washed my hair, dried it with a towel, and then massaged my head a little bit, and then another guy, without asking me any questions about how I wanted my hair to look, cut it. Then they washed my hair a second time and blow-dried it. The whole thing cost me 10 yuan. I've heard haircuts are very nice here and now I know they're right.

I went back to watch the girls play music yesterday at 3:30. I saw them play one song where some of them were playing the guqin and some were singing. They were excited to see me.


They finished at 4:00 and I walked back to my apartment. At 5:00 I met one of the other teachers and Bobby, who is Bob's son, and we took a taxi to school to go play basketball with some students. We played for a while and then Bob took myself, Bobby, another teacher, and another member of the faculty to go meet some other teachers at a restaurant for dinner. I thought Bob and I were going to talk about setting up a language exchange between Bobby and I but it didn't come up. Bobby is a freshman in high school at one of the best high school's here in Xinyu. He's a really nice kid and his English is very good so I hope we do get something set up.

First full week of class finished

Today I completed my first full week of class. The two classes I had this morning both went pretty well, much better than my first time with these students last Friday. We have a textbook although I don't plan to use it too much. I think I'll use the general topics for each unit as a guide and have the students do some reading from the textbook for homework, but in class I'm going to try to do other activities. Today's topic was water conservation so we did some discussion-based activities related to environmental conservation and economic development.

I also found out this morning that today is national teacher's day in China. I received a few gifts from some of the students; a small, nice-looking apple (about two inches in diameter), a fan made of wood and silk with calligraphy on one side and a picture of a famous building in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province, on the other, and a greeting card from English Education Class 2, my second class on Friday mornings.

Tonight there's a performance at school that is, I think, in celebration of teacher's day. Some of the other teachers and I will be taking the bus at 6:30 back to the new campus to watch the show.

Class

I'm nearing the end of my first full week of class. I teach seven classes of students majoring in teaching English and two classes of students majoring in business or business English. Since all my classes are so similar (about the same number of students, all of whom have the same major), I basically end up teaching the same class nine times each week before I move on to the next lesson. So it already is and will continue to be repetitive, but it allows me to review what was good and what was bad about a particular lesson and then tweak it and try it out on the next class. I do realize, though, that this pattern could mean that the first class will end up receiving my worst lessons every time. Although my first two classes last Friday probably were my worst, I think things should continue to get better for my students as the semester goes on and as I learn more about teaching.

I suppose it's apparent that I still don't feel entirely confident with my teaching, and I don't. But I'm trying to learn, mostly from other teachers and from stuff I read on the internet. But my basic goal right now is to get all the students to speak as much English in class as possible. One thing I've done to try and get them to speak more English is to make a rule that prohibits Chinese during class. If someone breaks the rule then everyone has to stand up and sing a song. The song goes to the tune of "The Wheels on the Bus" but the words are "In class we speak only English, only English...that's how we improve". I'm not sure yet if this will prove to be an effective deterrent but that's what I've got for now. Other than the rule, I've heard that competition works the best as a motivator so I'm going to try and keep that in mind. I also bring candy to class for those who win a game or do well at something and it seems to work.

But I really like my students. Almost all of them are very energetic and very friendly. The guys in my classes are generally less active but most of my classes are almost all girls so the classroom environment has been good overall. Surprisingly, though, the most outgoing English students I've met have been guys. Most of them are majoring in solar energy studies. There's a major solar panel parts manufacturer called LDK not far from the college and lots of students go on to work there. These guys who are majoring in solar energy studies aren't enrolled in my classes but they sit in on my classes to practice their English. They've sought me out after class and I've eaten lunch with them on a few occasions. A lot of them play basketball and have invited me to play with them so I'll probably be seeing them a lot more this year.

Last thing for now is that quite a few of my students have some very unexpected English names. Here are a few of them: Paper, Angle, Fantasy, Linkle and Sinkle, Boat, Jelly, Irany (perhaps Irony was the intended spelling), Tomato, Coin (which grows on me every time I see it), Log, Shavin, and Treason. A lot of girls have boys names although I haven't had any boys with anything too wild. I've explained to the students with strange names that they have strange names and that they should consider changing them. Some of them do, some of them don't understand what I'm saying. Next class I think I'll try to make it more clear to some of the students that they should consider changing their names.

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.

Xinyu University has arranged for buses to come and pick up teachers living at the old campus, like myself, and take us to the new campus every weekday morning. The bus leaves at 7:20 and we arrive at around 8. I took the bus yesterday morning to meet Doreen and some of the other staff and faculty at the school. Doreen is the head of the Foreign Affairs Department and the Vice Dean of the Foreign Languages Department. I met her soon after I got to school and she introduced me to more faculty members including Andy, who, I think, teaches English, and Bob, who is the Dean of the Foreign Languages Department and the Foreign Languages Department Communist Party Secretary. Doreen explained to me that every department in the school has a secretary from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Bob also happens to be a big fan of sports and is currently learning how to play tennis. He asked me to play with him later that afternoon, so at around 4 we went over to the school's courts located in the southeast corner of campus. They have five or six courts, all of which were quite fast. But they're brand new so they're still in good shape and without any cracks.

Not long after Bob and I started hitting, the school's tennis teacher came down to the courts. Bob went to go hit with some other players on the court next to us while the tennis instructor and I hit. There was a group of students who were in the middle of their ROTC training, which is mandatory for all freshmen students at Xinyu, and many of them stayed to watch us hit after they had finished. A small group of students and adults interested in tennis also came and watched us play. After we finished, I got to meet some of the students, some of whom I may have in class.

After tennis, I was invited to go out with Doreen and Bob to a dinner that was being hosted for some of the faculty at school. There was a lot of toasting going on throughout the dinner and Doreen provided me with some useful information about toasting etiquette. Some of the attendees were pretty drunk by the end of it, one guy in particular. Luckily, though, the guy who drove me and a couple other people back to our apartment was not one of the drunk ones.

I start teaching tomorrow. I have two classes of oral English. I'll mostly be teaching that class, but I'll also have two classes of business English. Doreen says I don't need to know anything about business, so I suppose I'm qualified.