Our school had a ceremony (speeches, fireworks at the end) on Friday morning to celebrate its status change from training school to college. Up until this year, all of Xinyu College's students were 3 year students. Although I'm not sure about other departments, the foreign studies department where I teach was basically a vocational school. There were three majors: English Education, Business English, and Business Japanese. So all the students were expected to find fairly permanent jobs in those fields following graduation.

Now the college also has an English major for 4 year students. These are the students who did better in high school. And with a major in English I guess some of them might go on to graduate school instead of getting into a career right after college. So the school's reputation has jumped up a bit this year.

We were allowed to leave school without having to attend any post-ceremony lunch parties. That was lucky given the extreme likelihood that we would have been made to drink 白酒 (baijiu, liquor), the drink of choice for any lunch or dinner gathering of more than 3 people.

Later that night Bleisha, Fujii, and I went to a massage parlour just up the street where Bleisha and Laura have gone a few times this semester. I had already heard from Laura that it hurts pretty bad but that I would feel better the next day. Most of it did hurt pretty bad but I didn't really feel much better the next day. I was mostly just sore in my shoulders and lower back. But it was pretty funny, I guess. Me, Bleisha, and Fujii all in one room, lying as quietly as we could as the three masseuses slapped us and yanked us and kneaded us until one of us would say ouch or "痛" (tong, pain). All in all I might do it again some day.

A Pictureless Post

Sorry for having not posted any pictures recently. I'd like to but my camera huai le'd (done broke) so I'm going to have to stick with text this time. Since Thanksgiving ended I've been going to school but mostly to observe other teachers since I'm now down to 2 classes a week. It's been good though, I've come up with some ideas for lessons and I've also picked up on some teaching methods that work and some that don't.

I've also been tutoring quite a bit, four times a week usually. It's almost always at night since that's the only time when Michelle doesn't have class, so I've been taking a taxi over to her house at around 6:30 and stay there for 2 hours each time. During the first hour we usually talk about what she's been doing and then watch a TV show (usually Friends) for the second hour with me explaining slang or cultural references made during the show. I think the TV viewing is helping her. Maybe, I hope.

I met a couple guys from Britain who teach at the Number 4 middle school across the street from the old campus. They're here for a gap year teaching English before they will return to England to start college. Myself and the other foreign teachers have gone out with them a few times to a couple restaurants and a bar where we were the only customers on a Saturday night. It was a pretty nice bar nonetheless.

I was going to go to a tennis tournament in Nanchang this weekend but it was rescheduled, I think, due to bad weather. But I still play every now and then with various people around the city.

I've learned a lot about the Chinese education system from Michelle, and what I've learned is basically that it's extremely intense. First, from middle school to high school the students have class 7 days a week. Monday through Friday they have morning, afternoon, and night classes, on Saturday they get the night off, and Sunday they get the morning off. There also doesn't seem to be a clear start and stop date for the school year. They just keep studying and going to class and taking tests until the teacher tells them they can take a break, which is sometime around the Spring Festival in early February, and then come back to school until sometime in June. They officially have a summer holiday of about a month but I think a lot of the students still go to classes of some sort, most likely at private English language schools. At the end of high school, they take their college entrance exams. If they do well, then they go to college, and if they don't do so well, they either go to a less reputable college or stay on in high school for another year to study and prepare to take the test again. So there's a ton of pressure on kids to do well in school and study all the time. They're not all sad or really angry or that sort of thing. I guess there's a lot of camaraderie amongst the students. Plus they basically have no choice, it's the only way for them to have the chance to get a higher-paying job. It's just very different from, say, ol' Avery High.

I think that's all I've got for now. I'll be coming home in a couple weeks.

Thanksgiving

Some pictures from Thanksgiving.

Here's the food.


My mashed taters are in the silver pan with the glass top and the black handle. Dumplings to the left, Romeo's chicken at 11 o' clock. Bleisha's green beans and another vegetable dish at the bottom of the picture. Fruit salad next to the ketchup. Fujii's sweet egg sushi rolls with the toothpicks sticking out. And Bleisha's sweet yam dish in the green bowl with the plastic wrap on top.

All of us.


Bill with the chopsticks at the front. Romeo to his left. A guy who works at the gym where Laura and Bleisha go. Then me, then Fujii, then Sheila, who is also from the Philippines but teaches at another college in Xinyu called YuGong College. Next is Bleisha and last is another student of mine named Elaine. You may notice there's another head poking out from behind the top of Bill's hair. That's JingJing, another teacher at the college.

The gym guy, Laura, me, Fujii, and Sheila.


Elaine, Bill, Romeo, and JingJing.


And finally, me and Bleisha at Kung Fu class a couple months ago.


We never went back, too much natural talent.

I'm now done with 7 out of my 9 classes, but I'm still pretty busy. I've been going to some other teachers' classes to try and learn more about how to teach. I'll also be helping students prepare for a couple upcoming speech competitions. And I've picked up a tutoring job with a girl named Michelle who'll be going to Canada in January for her last two years of high school and, potentially, college. We meet four times a week for two hours at a time. This is probably what I'll be doing for this last month of the semester.

Shanghai

Last week we had three days off plus the weekend for a school event called "Sports Meeting", which is basically like field day for all the freshmen. For the past few weeks the freshmen classes have been running and exercising on their own in preparation for the competition. Some of the teachers also had to participate, but none of us foreign teachers were required to stay so I took a trip to Shanghai. This is my third time in China but it was my first time to go to Shanghai.

Shanghai is located in the eastern tip of China and about midway up latitude-wise. It sits right at the mouth of the Yangtze River, Asia's longest river, so it's been a major port city for a while now. There's also a river called the Huangpu River that branches off from the Yangtze and runs through the city.

On one side of the city are huge, modern buildings.


I never made it over there during my trip. Instead, I spent most of my time on the south side of the river. Unlike the north side of the river, the southern side is full of Western-style buildings built in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which was Western businesses really started getting interested in Shanghai. I've never seen anything like it in another Chinese city. There was a small section in Guangzhou that had a lot of Western architecture, but Shanghai is full of it. As you get further out of the city, of course, the buildings are more modern and less strikingly Western but the heart of the city looks very European.




I spent most of my first day just walking around some of the older parts of the city. Then it was either on the first or the second day that I met a couple other people staying at the hostel. One was a guy named Scott from Wales who was looking for a teaching job in Shanghai. He found one within the three days that I was staying at the hostel. Another guy I met, Matt, was from Chicago and had just finished a year in Afghanistan and was traveling around East Asia for a while before going back to the US. I hung out with Matt for a couple days until he left for Hong Kong.

I also met another American guy named Mike who was taking a break from work and traveling for a while, and a Polish guy named Mikhail who is a freelance translator for Polish MTV and Comedy Central. His most recent job was to translate Jersey Shore into Polish. I also got a chance to see a couple of my classmates from Davidson Chinese 101, Andrew and Whitey, who are teaching English in a city called Jiaxing, which is about an hour train-ride away from Shanghai. It was good to see them and I had a good time hanging out with all the people from the hostel.

On my last morning in the city I took the metro to what I found out was one of the ritziest parts of the city. But I knew where I was going. It took me about 15 minutes to walk there, deliberate for another 20 over a bowl of noodles, and finally make a decision. So here's what I got.



I tried it out in the driveway the night I got back and I've been going to the People's Square 人民广场 every day for the past few days to practice. I'm really liking it.

Exam time, already

I found out a couple weeks ago from the administration that all the third year students finish their classes and their exams earlier than the first and second year students at Xinyu College. Their last day of classes/exams is November 19th, after which they are supposed to find an internship or a job.

Seven of my nine classes are with third year students majoring in English education. After November 19th, many of them will return to their hometown to teach in a local elementary school. This means I have to finish classes and exams in the next two weeks. Since each class has close to 50 students, it is common for teachers to break up the exam into two class periods, where half the students come one week and the other half come the next week. I too will be using this format for my exam, which is going to be quite easy. The exam is simply a 3-4 minute conversation between me and the student where I ask questions and he or she answers them. There is no written part, it's all oral.

I was thinking about having the students make up and perform skits in English, but when I proposed that idea to one of my classes, they all made it very clear that skits would be boring. They pointed out that skits only require memorization, whereas a one-on-one conversation requires that they actually understand what I say and come up with a response. Thus I will be giving all of my third year students the conversation-style exam.

Since only half the students will be coming to class for the next two weeks, this was our last week with everyone together. At the end of each class we took pictures for about 5 or 10 minutes. I took some with my own camera and then a bunch of the students took pictures with me using their phones. Here are some of mine:










After November 19th, I will only have two classes of second year students majoring in Business English. Romeo suggested that the administration may ask me to teach English to students from outside the foreign languages department. (All college students, regardless of their major, must pass an English language test called the CET). I'm not sure yet what I will be doing after I finish with the third year students, but if the administration doesn't give me anything else, I think I'll look into teaching some tennis.

Lights out

Yesterday I left my apartment at around five in the afternoon to go downtown and shop for clothes. I bought a few things, ate dinner, and then took a bus back to the old campus. When I got off, things seemed a little strange but I wasn't sure exactly what it was. I started to walk in the direction that I thought was towards the apartment until I realized that not only was I going the wrong way, but also that none of the buildings on that street had power. I asked someone for directions and eventually arrived back at the apartment. I had walked for about fifteen minutes and still all of the buildings were without power, including our apartment. I put down some of my things in my apartment and went back outside to buy candles. The man on duty at the gate told me how to say "candle" in Chinese ("la zhu") and I went down the street towards some shops that sell household supplies. The first store I went into had already sold out of candles but the second one still had four left. I bought three of them before realizing that I had no candle holders. I asked the shopkeeper but he said they didn't have any. He did, however, have a solution.


After I got back, I lit a couple candles and then went to see what Bleisha was doing. Having the power cut off was perfect for Halloween night so we tried to scare Laura. Bleisha called her and told her to come up to her room to hang out. When Laura got to the top of the stairs I jumped out and yelled her name, but Laura had already seen me hiding so the attempt failed. Afterwords we hung out at Bleisha's for a while. Then I went back to my room and just as I was getting into bed the power came back on. I still don't know what caused it.

Orange picking

I went orange picking this morning with my Business English students as well as Laura and Bleisha. I've heard there are quite a few orange farms in the Xinyu area and oranges do seem to be the most common fruit eaten here in Xinyu. The farm we went to was about 15 minutes away by cab and Bleisha, Laura, and I met the students there at around 9 in the morning. It's, I think, about 7 to 10 yuan (1 or 2 US dollars) per person and you can pick up to 1 or 2 kilograms worth of oranges. I don't know exactly how much it costs because the students paid for us.

The orange picking mostly consisted of walking around the farm, picking some oranges, eating a couple, and maybe taking a few pictures with someone's cell phone.


I got a few of my own. Here's one with we and some of my students.


Michael taking a picture of Laura (in the top middle) and some students.


Bill climbing a tree to get oranges from the top.


Bill in the top of another tree, this time a taller one.


We walked around picking oranges for about an hour and then started to head back towards the entrance. Before we left, we took a few class photos. Here's one.


The characters on the flag "外国语系" mean "Foreign Languages Department". They took the flag off its staff for our class pictures.

And here are a few more of my students.


The flag was soon returned to its rightful position on the staff, and Bleisha led the way with it as we marched out of the farm, purses, backpacks and old grocery bags filled with oranges. Here's Bleisha with Bill to the right and Henry, who got lost during the trip and found us again at the end with some very unripe-looking oranges, on the left.


Because we were such a big group, the owner of the farm let us take up to 75 kilograms of oranges. But the students hadn't taken nearly that much, so Bill, Bruce, Tiger, and I went back with a couple big sacks to fill them up. We filled both sacks and came back to the rest of the students, all of whom had been waiting outside the entrance. We set the two sacks down and a mad scramble for oranges ensued. After that we walked a little ways to the bus stop where the students would catch a bus back to school. Bleisha, Laura, and I sad goodbye and took a cab back to the old campus.