Having Fun All The Time

This morning was cooking western food day in my classes; it was the last full-class meeting for both of my 50-student classes, so earlier this week I went to the second-biggest city in the province, Xiamen, to buy some taco shells and hot sauce and cheese and to do some sightseeing, and then I came back two nights ago with a long list of things to do (prepare for family to arrive in China, finish final exams, rehearse for yet another singing performance, find students for the English class I want to teach this summer, and make tacos with 100 students).

Yesterday I ran around all day doing these various tasks, and as I was about to go out shopping for tomatoes and chicken for the tacos one of my students reminded me that she had invited me to go out to a big fish dinner that night with some of the other teachers from our department.

So I wrote out a list for some other students to go shopping and gave them some cash and went out with the teachers to a big meal of steaming bowls of fish soup and lots of beer.

I could tell right away, as soon as we started eating, that the students were planning on getting me unconscionably drunk. The restaurant was one of the small classic gritty ones with peeling gold paisly-textured wallpaper and a cigarette-smoke-stained ceiling, chairs that wobbled when you moved and a big round table with a sort-of lazy Susan glass platform in the center. Immediately one of the tougher female students (these were the students from my adult training class, all about 28-40 years old) started toasting me and making me down shots of beer. In the first 20 minutes I probably drank the equivalent of four beers. Needless to say, by the time midnight rolled around and we called a cab to return back to school, I could hardly keep my eyes open and my Chinese had become completely incomprehensible.

I came back to the school with three other students, seated in the cab with 20 pounds of chicken, 30 pounds of tomatoes, a hot plate-like cooker and pots and pans and stuff in bags and boxes on our laps. All of us pretty much drunk (I must say that I do not particularly enjoy these overdrinking experiences, but they seem for the most part harmless and certainly make the dining experiences lively). Our class started at 8 a.m. the next morning, and I still wasn’t clear how we were going to cook the chicken and prepare everything.

Of course, when I woke up in the morning at 6 o’clock, none of those things had become more clear. Also it was dumping down rain outside, and my apartment is a 10 minute walk from the teaching building. And I had to carry a big cardboard box of food and a big electric cooker to the classroom.

So I showered and carried the box of stuff there, and then waited for the first few students to arrive. They brought the chicken and explained that they could chop it up into small pieces, ala the classes Chinese dish gong bao ji ding (cubed deep-fried chicken), and then fry it with the chili powder I had brought. That sounded like a good idea, so I told them they could start and then headed back for my cooker.

But, in my still-dazed state, I forgot my keys when I left the classroom, so I walked all the way back to my apartment in the rain, hiding under my umbrella but still getting soaked in the downpour, and then when I got to my apartment realized I had no keys and decided that the only option was to kick in my door, Jean Claude Van Dame-style.

At first this idea seemed stupid, but after a couple of hard kicks I realized it was fun, and on my third kick I had it. I kicked the hell out of the door and the lock broke off the door frame and the door flew open. I grabbed the cooker and dashed back out into the rain, then dropped the cooker in the rain as I tried to open my umbrella, then got it all organized finally and got to class.

So by now I am completely soaked, hungover, tired, and still have to figure out how to make some kind of sort-of western food with my classes.

But here is where my fawning ode the the efficiency and organizational skills of my students comes in. By the time I got back to my classroom they had organized the desks into little work stations and were dicing tomatoes and pre-boiling chicken in the first cooker. In about 30 minutes with a bit of instruction the students had prepared a huge bowl of fresh salsa (tomatoes, green chili peppers, diced onion, sugar, lemon juice), and deep fried/stir fried the chicken in little cubes with onion and peppers and chili powder. We cut up some cheese and olives I had bought in Xiamen and I showed them how to put the tacos together.

The students were pretty consistently refering to the salsa as “salad” in Chinese so at this point I basically explained that they should put the deep-fried chicken on the bottom, and the salad on top, and then chow down. I told them they could try some cheese if they wanted, but when they ate the cheese most of them exclaimed “bu hao chi!”, which basically means “tastes bad!” even though it was real cheddar and mozzarella from the U.S. and tasted good to me. So we just ate tacos with Chinese deep-fried chicken and salsa on top, and to me it was decent, if not good (the taco shells were meant to be heated up in an oven, so they were kind of bland and too chewy).

The thing I forgot to consider was that tacos are inevitably messy, and become messier when you are eating stir/deep-fried chicken that is dripping with grease, and become still messier when you have no plates or napkins. So instantly the floor of the small classroom, with 50 students all eating grease-bomb tacos, was coated in oil and tomato and fried chicken.

I should add here that in the couple of weeks leading up to this little cooking event, my students pretty regularly asked me when we were going to cook pizza/hamburgers. They asked me this even after I explained that we were eating neither pizza nor hamburgers, but something called tacos which is a kind of Mexican food. The students, after hearing this explanation, inevitably continued to call our upcoming food either pizza or hamburgers, having no frame of reference to imagine what this taco thing might be. Last night, though, on the way to dinner, I did overhear one student saying to someone else on the phone that it wasn’t pizza, or hamburgers, but something like that.

Up until today I used to find that a little annoying — peoples’ inability to imagine that American food consists of anything other than pizza or hamburgers or fast food. But this morning before class I guess I just understood it a bit better. There is just no way for them to get that it’s not either of those things. It’s like snails: in English we have one word for snails, and that is “snails”. But in Chinese cuisine there are a ton of different kinds of snails, and none of them are called the word “snail”. The word “snail” exists in Chinese, but nobody eats “snails”. Snails live outside and you find them on the ground. The things you eat are not snails. If you say, I ate “snails” (wo1niu2) for lunch today, a Chinese person will look at you with shock and explain that that is impossible, even if you ate snails with them. This is so complicated and abstruse that even I barely understand it. It would be ridiculous to expect that an average American who had never gone to China would know anything about this — likewise with Chinese perceptions of American food.

OK, so we made the tacos, the students were amazing, they cooked and diced and boiled and fried, and I was amazed to find that, even though I heard plenty of “it tastes really bad!” throughout, at the end of both my classes everything was eaten up. In the second class, in particular, probably because it was closer to lunchtime, the students ate all 6-7 pounds of chicken and 6-7 pounds of tomato in less than 10 minutes. And they ate most of the cheese, too.

At noontime when the classes were over it had stopped raining and four of my students helped me carry everything back to my apartment, and on the way one of the training students asked a student from my younger class if she liked the food. My student’s response was, in Chinese, “it was so-so…it’s just that we’re not used to eating it”. This was great — the kind of response I was hoping for. It means not necessarily that the food was bad but that it was different enough from their past experience to actually kind of be Western food. The tacos weren’t good, and the chicken was kind-of Chinese (even though there was no soy sauce in it), but they were Western.

And, as a bonus, when we were near my building, the same student told me, in English, and out-of-the-blue, without my asking anything about the class: “I like the Western style of teaching. I feel that in the Chinese education system our classes are too boring. But in the Western system the teachers do more interesting things, and then the students can learn more outside of class.”

I laughed and asked her if that meant she liked my class.

“Yes, of course,” she said. And then she added: “It’s not like our other classes. In our other classes, we are always preparing for tests. We have too many tests.”

This reminded me of the CET-6, which I blogged about last semester and which she then told me the students would all be taking again tomorrow afternoon. This particular student had failed the CET-6 last semester (along with virtually all the others in the class) and was no doubt facing pressures from all directions to pass it this time.

The students handed my stuff to me when we got to my place, gawking at the smashed door lock and peeking curiously into my place, and then I wished them luck in tomorrow’s tests and they headed off to lunch.

Finally I got a chance to rest a little after last night’s excitement, and actually I opted to write this post. In ten minutes I’m off to give a few spoken English exams and then in the afternoon I’m headed to the city to hand out flyers for this summer’s class and buy World Expo tickets for my family.

I realized that with every month that passes in China I become slightly more poor; my $600 per month salary is just about $100-200 too small to sustain my student loans back home and my perhaps slightly too spendy lifestyle here. So I am taking little bites out of the I saved in Portland before I came out here. So wish me luck with finding students for that summer private English class.

Or some kind of magical falling-from-the-sky kind of luck with fiction writing. My latest and I thought best yet story that I submitted to about 10 journals earlier this year has been rejected from all but 3.  : )   But there are still those 3.

It is so hot in Fujian right now you could fry an egg on my sunburned back.

It is hot enough to melt the flip flops to your feet.

Then again, it is June, which is officially a summer month, I guess. It’s hard to believe I have been here for just a few days shy of seven months, but anyway.

I am shortly about to venture out to town with a couple of students to try and find some “Western” ingredients so that we can make tacos in class next week. Which I am excited about. The students always ask me what I used to eat in America, and I invariably have to answer Mexican food, because that was the staple of my diet (after mac and cheese, which they would hate anyway because of the cheese part).

I went to the supermarket by myself last weekend to scope out the food options and found some diced beef and “cheese” that tasted like cream cheese mixed with butter mixed with flavorless gelatin. So cheese is out. But I’m hoping that with luck we’ll be able to find the necessary ingredients for taco shells and salsa, and then we can fry up some chicken or beef and make approximations of tacos.

Things have progressed pretty well the last month or so, despite the lack of posts. I got my residence permit and reimbursement for the Hong Kong trip and an offer to stay indefinitely. Which is cool. I tried to get a new apartment on campus but found that all the other apartments are about in the same shape that mine is in, and when I asked if the newest building we looked at also had rats, I received the reply that every building has rats, with a chuckle. Luckily I have gotten used to them, and they haven’t been in my apartment nearly as much the last few months (mainly because I stopped leaving the screened window open at night, which somehow they were coming in through, although I’ve no idea how).

Next week I’m giving final exams and then family is arriving for a two-week tour of the country. We’re going to get out and explore Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Yangshuo, which is supposed to be one of the nicest and most fun tourist destinations in China.

And I think I am gradually fumbling my way towards being marginally conversational in Chinese. There is still a ton of work to do, but that part of life is always interesting and exciting as it progresses.

This summer a friend and I are gonna try to teach private English classes and that will hopefully bring in enough bread to at least cover my student loan costs for the next year, if it goes really well. If it doesn’t go well, I’m thinking that it will at least be a good experiment in trying to work independently here.

And I met an American who’s been living in this town for three years, volunteering at an orphanage that is somehow linked to his church back home. He’s my age and certainly seems to be doing good work here, so next week I’m going to go to the village where he works and hang out with some kids.

More later. Off to buy taco stuff.

Before I left to go on my visa run to Hong Kong, I really tried to find a site on the web that would explain everything to me. But I couldn’t find one. So I want to create a quick guide here to going to Hong Kong to change your visa status.

The whole thing is actually pretty easy, and once you get to Hong Kong there are so many English speakers that you really have nothing to worry about.

Here’s what you need to do: If you have a tourist visa and you want to switch it to a Z visa, there is no way to do that in mainland China. You have to leave mainland China to go to the embassy for your country (or, if you’re like me and hate waiting in lines, you can pay a travel agent in HK to go to the embassy for you). A great place to go is Hong Kong, because it’s close to the mainland and easily accessible and you don’t need a visa to enter Hong Kong if you’re U.S./British citizen.

What you need: You need a Foreign Expert’s License from the provincial capital of whatever province you intend to work in. This is a pink-colored piece of paper that says you are a foreign expert. You also need a letter from the Provincial Capital directing you to apply for a Z visa at the Hong Kong Embassy for your country.

NOTE: The letter MUST say Hong Kong. If it says “apply forthwith at the nearest embassy in your home country”, you will have to send it back to the provincial capital to be changed, which could be a delay of another week or so.

You also need a passport-sized photo for the application.

When you actually get to Hong Kong and apply for your Z-visa, the embassy or travel agency (whichever you use to get your Z visa — I used Shoestring Travel in Kowloon and they were quick and decently helpful and relatively cheap) will take the original documents away from you and just give you back a passport with the Z-visa in it. The Z visa will have a “duration of stay” of 000 (zero) days on it. But really this means that you and your employer have 30 days from your date of entry to mainland China to get a temporary residence permit so that you can stay in China. The residence permit can be valid for up to 12 months and allows you to travel in and out of China freely.

How to get to Hong Kong: If you’re relatively new to China as you’re thinking about going to China to apply for a residence permit, your Chinese skills might not be so good and you might be worried about expensive Hong Kong. I would say the first one, traveling with weak Chinese skills, shouldn’t be too much of a problem, and the second one, HK being expensive, you can’t do anything about.

But you should be able to get to HK pretty cheaply, especially if you’re in sourthern China.

Here’s how: Go to Shenzhen and take the subway from there to Hong Kong Go to this web site and look up the train schedule from your city to Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is in mainland China, right next to Hong Kong. If you take a train to Shenzhen, you can get off the train and inside the Shenzhen train station you can go through mainland China customs and cross over to official Hong Kong, and then take the Hong Kong subway to HK. (Once you get off the train in Shenzhen this will all be easy, because there are signs throughout the train station that say, in English, “HONG KONG”. You just need to follow these signs through the train station [most people will go that way] and you will find customs and the subway). The web site linked to above will give you pricing and time schedules for the trains going to Shenzhen. In my experience the site has always been accurate.

You have to actually go to the train station to buy train tickets in China. So go to your local train station and figure out how to buy the tickets you need. Basic Chinese should be able to accomplish this. You can say “dao4 Shen1 zhen4″, they will ask you what day, you say the day, whether you want a soft sleeper or hard sleeper (ruan3wo4 soft sleeper/ying4wo4 hard sleeper) and presto, you’ve got your ticket. (From what I understand, you can’t buy a train ticket more than 10 days in advance in mainland.)

If you’re traveling a really long ways and have money to spare, soft sleepers aren’t bad. There’s less cigarette smoke and it’s theoretically more secure because you get a small cabin with only 3 other people, so there’s less risk of someone poking around in your stuff. The beds are about the same in terms of comfort. The difference between the two is just that hard sleeper you share a whole train car with maybe 80 other people in 3-stack bunks, whereas soft sleeper you get a more secluded (and quieter) cabin with 4 bunks, 2-stacked.

Overall I think both are pretty safe. If you are traveling with a lot of stuff and are seriously worried about someone stealing your stuff, go with the soft sleeper, but if you’ve just got a bag of clothes and a camera, keep your money and passport on your body and sleep with your camera by your feet or head, and put your bag of clothes wherever. Nobody wants to steal a bag of clothes anyway.

When you get on the train and find your bunk, just relax. Someone will come and take your ticket from you. They will give you a plastic card. Keep this card. When you are close to arriving at your destination, they will come back and get your card from you, which will of course wake you up if you’re sleeping. If they’re taking your card, it means you’re almost there so you can get your stuff together. If you want to ask someone when you’re going to arrive, you can say “wo3men shen2me shi2hou4 dao4 Shen1zhen4″ (I’m not good at Chinese so the grammar here is probably wrong, but it gets the message across).

In Shenzhen, it’s easy to find the border. Cross the border and take the subway to Hong Kong. The HK subway is labeled in English and now that you’re in HK it will be super easy to get around because at least half of the people around you are fluent in English.

Once you’re in Hong Kong: If you have your papers with you when you arrive in Hong Kong, it will only take two to three business days (maximum) to get your visa. You might be able to do it in less than 24 hours.

If you’re like me and had to go to Hong Kong to wait for your papers to come in the mail, you might have to hang out for a while. If this is the case and you’re trying to reduce expenses, I would recommend staying on Lamma Island. It’s way cheaper than anywhere in HK and it’s easy to get to by a 20-minute ferry ride and much more relaxing. If you’re staying in HK for a while and want to keep costs low or just not stay in the busy city, just go to Lamma. But, if you want to stay in the city and money isn’t really a problem, SoHo is nice. If you want to stay in the city and you want to save money, the ChungKing Mansions in Kowloon (hostels) are definitely the cheapest place to stay in the city. I stayed in the New Peking Guest House (actually called the Peking Guest House once you arrive there) and it was satisfactory, about 180 HKD per night for a tiny private room.

I think that should cover most everything for someone who has to go to HK to change visas. Once you get your Z visa, of course, you have to return to mainland and still get your residence permit, which requires that you have a foreign expert’s card, which is like a second passport, kind of. So that’s potentially another hassle if your employer is as unhelpful as mine was. But this little guide should get you through the trip to HK and back without costing you too much money.

If any travelers in this situation actually stumble across this and have any questions, I’m happy to answer.

And remember to have fun while you’re in Hong Kong. : )

One of the good things about getting a visit from a friend who is also a teacher in another part of China was that I got to hear how her employer had helped her handle the hurdles of moving to the country to teach.

For her, the process sounded remarkably easy once she got the job. Her employer handled all the paperwork before she left the U.S. and provided her with ample assistance finding a suitable apartment when she arrived. They also offered her a pretty hefty salary — not big by U.S. standards, but not small either (she makes almost three times what I make, but she works 30 hours a week to my 12 and she lives in the third-largest city in China while mine probably doesn’t even make the top 100, so that’s the explanation for that).

They also reimburse her each month for a fraction of the flight costs to the country, so that when he contract is up she will have been reimbursed the full amount.

You can probably guess what all this explaining is leading up to…yep, my coming-to-the-country and paperwork situation has been so different from hers as to be totally unrecognizable. My paperwork was not even really started before I left the U.S., I went to Hong Kong about four-ish months in to change my visa status, and now the matter still hasn’t been entirely settled. (I won’t go into details here, but…you get the picture.)

The reason my visa experience has been so much more convoluted is itself convoluted and involves miscommunications, bureaucratic snafus, lackadaisical administrators and probably a fair measure of cultural differences. Suffice it to say that between my school and I, the visa issue has been at times hairy, at times thorny, and even on a couple occasions bordering on antagonistic.

So, a little bit after my sixth month in-country without the visa issue fully resolved, I delivered an ultimatum of sorts. Being nice and friendly had gotten me nowhere, being accomodating but firm had also gotten me just about nowhere, so I decided to make things as clear as possible: get the visa situation taken care of this month, or I’m going to make like a tree and get outta here.

This did seem to make the message much more clear. But things have not taken shape as quickly as I would have liked them to. So I am still holding my breath, in a sense. Which would put me close to seven months of breath-holding. But, things other than that seem to be moving along fairly nicely. And I have been promised that the visa will be done within the week. So when I know, I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing about it here.

Till then thanks for tuning in.

: )

Well, it happened today — perhaps every language teacher’s worst nightmare.

I was teaching one of my small oral English classes (small meaning about 25 students; see footnote for more details*), and asked them to do some discussion in class. The chapter we were working on focused on a girl who didn’t want to go to school because she was afraid she was going to get made fun of. And the discussion question the book provided was “Why do you think children don’t like to be different from others?” That seemed germane and easy enough to talk about, so I went with it. I carefully asked the students to discuss the question in pairs, taking turns, with three minutes for each person to share her ideas. I stressed that they should speak only in English, not Chinese.

I asked them to begin, and they didn’t do anything. So I asked them to begin again. They looked at each other awkwardly. So I explained it again. And told them to begin. So they began.

Last semester when I assigned discussion I would wander around the room to make sure the students weren’t just playing on their phones or chatting in Chinese. But this semester, thanks to the fact that I split my classes in two to make them more managable (again see note below), I can actually just sort of stand at the head of the classroom and keep an eye on all of them and sort of hear bits of what each pair is saying. Or at least make sure that they’re saying it in English, not Chinese.

But today, as I was standing at the head of the class, I realized that it was fairly quiet in the room, aside from a sort of general mumbling sound that made it impossible to tell what any one person was saying, save for a couple of students who were obviously doing the discussion. So I sort of looked away from them to try to focus on the general sound in the room, which is hard to do in a room of 25 people. And then I realized that I wasn’t actually hearing any English at all. Or Chinese. I was hearing a lot of people “talking”, and when I looked at the class they all appeared to be doing the assignment (i.e. their mouths were moving and they were nodding and making conversation-like facial expressions), but nobody was actually saying anything.

Yeah. If it’s not already obvious, that means that I realized in an instant that most of the students in my class were pretending to talk. They were moving their mouths and nodding their heads in agreement, as though engaged in meaningful discussiong, but they were actually just miming speech, play-acting more-or-less silently with the sole purpose of making me think I had actually given them an assignment worth anything. I tried to inconspicuously focus on a couple of pairs of students and confirmed it…there was definitely no sound coming from their mouths. At all. At least a couple of them. So I asked one student if she was actually saying anything, and her and her partner both cracked up laughing instantly, and I ended the activity immediately. A little shaken, but glad, at least, that I had figured out what was going on.

So then I did what I often end up doing in class, which was to lead the whole group in a discussion by asking each student the question individually, rather than asking them to do the discussion on their own. I was planning to come back together and discuss as a group anyway, but my hope was that by giving them the chance to dicuss one-on-one first, everybody would get a chance to flex their language muscles and get ready to share with the rest of the class. Which didn’t work. Dismal teaching failure number 3,958.

I still haven’t figured out how the hell to use discussion in class and have it work. It is the last and apparently most untouchable speaking practice, as far as I can tell, yet reputedly the most effective, like the Holy Grail of language teaching. But I just can’t make it work. I’m sure if I were teaching classes of four to eight it would work just fine, but in a room of 25, not to mention 50, which is my normal class size, it is just impossible to have a bunch of people talking at once. Everything devolves into chaos and one language learner can’t hear or understand the other. So everybody mimes, just to make the teacher feel better.

If any wayward Internet traveler or reader has any ideas on how to make discussion-en-masse work, I’m all ears. Till then, I think I will try to hone down and specify the discussion assignments even further, and make it more like a “practice what you’re going to say” type activity. Which is I think what all their other English teachers do, anyway. Which is sort of like discussion, right?

On a side note, I am performing tomorrow night in a play entitled (in Chinese) “The Foreigner Is Coming”. You can guess what character I play. I have a few throw-away lines that the audience won’t understand, and one throw-away line in Chinese that they will understand, but mostly I am in the play for my blond hair and freakish height. Oh, and I’m playing “You Are My Sunshine” accoustic with students accompanying me. I can’t remember how I ended up agreeing to do it anymore, but I’m sure I wasn’t in my element, whenever it was. There will be an audience of about 500. Oh, and last night I attempted to sing a rather difficult Chinese song at another school assembly, again with 500 people in attendance, and forgot the words, killed the audience with microphone feedback, and then had a broken microphone for half the song, oh, and also, there was some awkward trying to hold the microphone with my arms full of flowers that the students surprised me by running onstage with during the song, and the choral singers that joined me onstage at the wrong time. Oh yeah, and I can’t sing or dance to begin with. Or speak Chinese. It was awesome.

Let’s hope “The Foreigner Is Coming” goes a little better tomorrow.

*Footnote: Last semester I had four different classes, all about 40 to 50 students in size, with a total of about 14 teaching hours per week. So I was a bit of a stress ball and found teaching that many students mostly hopeless. But this semester I had fewer classes and less class time (only two different classes, both 50 students, for a total of 8 hours per week), so I elected to divide the classes in two and meet with each half once a week, and the whole group once a week, making for a total of 12 class hours each week. As if anybody cares…but the difference between teaching 50 students in one small, hot, sweaty room and teaching 25 students in that same room is the difference between war and peace. And I didn’t know that last semester.

Well, classes and the semester have started up again, which means that I am again back in front of groups of 50 students at a time, trying to help them figure out the actually pretty difficult language that is English.

Luckily I think I’ve figured out how to teach English a bit better this semester, so the stress level involved with preparing for and teaching classes seems to be way lower now. Part of that has to do with simplifying and streamlining what I’m teaching and how I’m teaching it, and part of it also has to do with the fact that this semester I just have fewer students.

Part of “simplifying and streamlining” the teaching process, for me, I think, meant just making it more boring (for me, not for the students, I hope). In my first semester I think I spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to create new lesson plans and different ways of teaching. I went all over the place with my lesson plans and activities, trying everything I could think of or find on the internet. In a way, I think that was good because I tried a lot of different things and learned about what works and what doesn’t work in the classroom. Then again, I also spent a lot of time in-class explaining my new lesson plans to students. I mean a LOT of time. Which I don’t think is a very productive way for them to practice their spoken English. Which was supposed to be what the class was about.

(Just to record it here, some of the things I tried in class included: call-and-response scripts, writing dialogues and performing them, handing out slips of paper with questions on them and timing the students and asking them to ask and answer them in pairs, giving the class disicussion questions and tearing my hair out while the whole class proceeded to sit around and chat in Chinese and play with their cell phones, lecturing on the present perfect and present continuous and past perfect tenses and trying in vain to get the students to practice them, trying to teach them songs and having them tell me that the songs were too fast and too hard to sing, and on top of that not being able to sing the songs myself, attempting to get the students to practice basic conversation by teaching them simple phrases like “how ya doin’?” and “how’s it goin’?” and then realizing that the students already knew these phrases but still couldn’t use them in basic conversation, for reasons unknown, trying to teach the students pronounciation of vowels and then realizing that they had already learned the vowels but pronounced them strangely for reasons that I couldn’t determine at all, and only determined by accident, usually, months later, & etc, &etc. Most of these lessons were relatively painful and stressful, because the students didn’t understand them and I was trying them cold for the first time. & etc.)

So this semester I have significantly pared down what I am trying to do with the hope that if I can simplify things a lot, and focus on helping the students practice a few key skills, like taking basic English sentence structures and creating new sentences creatively, and like retelling stories from our readings using creative twists of the tales — I’m hoping by doing this stuff we’ll be able to make real progress. I’m also using audio recorders this semester to record the students’ speech and play it back to them with critiques of their pronounciation and suggestions recorded by me. So I’m hoping that will help. There’s evidence that it will. When I logged into QQ (China’s MSN-like chat client) the other day, one of my students messaged me and told me that she liked the new class structure — and also that last semester she hadn’t understood my classes, so mostly she had just read the book in class. This is the kind of thing that happens in classrooms here often, I think. They’re so big and so unwieldy, and teachers tend to lecture nonstop with little knowledge of what is going on out among the ranks, that if students don’t like a class, or don’t feel that there’s anything to learn from it, they sleep, or read, or play on their phones. Which I guess isn’t different from the U.S. at all.

More on teaching later. For now I’ve got to run back to my dorm because someone is helping me to fix my internet today (I hope). Hurrah. That means HFATT should come back to life shortly.

Oh, and here’s an awesome first-time kind of basic guide to teaching oral English in China. When I stumbled across it, it was a revelation:

http://www.sinosplice.com/learn-chinese/guide-to-teaching-in-china

See you next time.

: )