Teaching English in China

I got a job! Finally! I am very thrilled about it and I hope its something that remains stable throughout the rest of my year here. Basically, a group of students at the University I am studying at, has started an English learning program named OES (Oral English Storm). They had contacted the director of my program looking for any native Englis speaking students who would be willing to take on the project and come in for an interview. I had jumped on the opporutniy since I had been looking for an opportunity like this for awhile. After the interview they had mentioned how I needed to give a teaching demonstration to the University (100 students/faculty members) in order to try and encourage university sudents to join their program. Basically, it was a private company based out of their school. The details are still a bit hazy to me. There were a group of four English teachers that OES was trying out and apparently I was the most popular teaching style that students wanted to sign up for! Dark skinned and all too! SO, I have officially been hired as a University faculty member at Minzu Daxue (Cenral University of Nationalities) as their topical english professor! The students organizing OES have given me freedom to create my own program. One of the most common subjects to teach in topical English is American campus life. I decided that this was too simple and not intersting enough. I didn't think that simply by talking for two hours about American campus life would be the most effective way to learn English...so I upgraded the lesson a bit. I decided to break the topic of Campus life into nine different sections such as admissions/applications, importance of sports, greek life, finals week (typical American study skills), etc. For my first lecture we had discussed first impressions of American campus life. I began by creating a vocabulary list that I would familiarize the students with before we began our discussion. I would encourage the students to create a sentence, on their own, for each word. The goal was to use as many vocubulary words as they can throughout the rest of the class period. Then I began by asking the students what their first impression was of American campus life. Many students, like I had suspected, started to list out famous hollywood movies such as Ameican Pie as a visual description of what they thought American campus life was like. They labeled our campus life as one big party.

It was a great answer and exactly what I was expecting, because I had brought in three clips from Legally Blonde to show to the class. The students had to take as many notes as they could about the clips and what they noticed about campus life. (I was hoping they would note clothing styles, teaching aids such as labtops and coffee), architectural structes and landscape, etc.) Some of these minor features could be accurate and are different from China's campus life. After this, we would discuss some of these pop-culture stereotypes of American campus life and how it compared to Chinese university stereotypes. We would also discuss some of the ways pop-culture portrayed Chinese univesities or asian university students. I made sure to inform the students that these holllywood depictions were not entirely true. The next nine lessons would be dedicated to truly delving into American campus life and what it is really like for an average campus student. I don't know, the students were receptive to it and it certainly generated some kind of conversation which is good. I assign various articles about the topics we will discuss next lesson and then have them thoroughly comprehend the material and underline/look up words they are not familiar with. We will then create conversation from these articles as well. I am hoping this prooves to be an effective strategy. If not, I will have to tweek my lesson plans. If anyone has any better ideas, I would love to have some feedback!

Another job that I recently was able to get through a connection in China was to tutor an "important leader in the government" and his wife and child. Tomorrow will be my first day working with them and I do not know how to approach this. It will be difficult to come up with a topic to discuss that would be interesting for the child and the parents. I am hoping it works out because apparently I will be taken care of very well and the family will take me out a lot and provide a car for me, etc. It will also be an intersting way for me to get exposed to the inside political scene of China!!! Maybe it will be an interesting connection for me in the future. However, I am leaving for Tibet for two weeks, as a class trip, beginning this Thursday. I do not know if this "important leader" will be ok with my taking a two week break. I cannot speak too much about this trip until I get back, for obvious reasons. I will give you all MANY updates when I return! Take care all!!!!!