Number One Teaching No-No: Students do not equal friends. I’ve learned this over the last year, and now I’ve taught a few new classes where I maintained enough distance between me and my students to be able to do my job and stay in control of the classroom. This was not the case for my […]
A while back, three students came running into my class five or six minutes late. Technically, they’re not allowed in the classroom after the bell rings, but these three had never been late before, always did their homework, and generally never made me angry. Plus, we were reviewing for an exam, and five minutes didn’t […]
Ok, if you’re teaching ESL and you’ve just finished exams and have two hours to burn with a class just before a holiday, I had better luck showing E.T. than I’ve ever had with a film in class before (note to any coworkers reading: I obtained appropriate permission to show a movie, complete with an […]
God almighty. Next week is finals week, and I’m limping toward the finish line. I’m tired, my students are tired, we’re all sick of each other, and I’m really ready to have a break. Today my IELTS class did a unit on water conservation, and somehow the discussion drifted from ways to conserve water to […]
That’s my city!
Saturday I went to Castle Bar with some friends and coworkers to see the Shanghai band Banana Monkey. There were posters plastered all over town for this, showing a guy in a gas mask looking very punk rock.
I’ve got to admit that I’ve had a pretty snotty attitude toward Chinese music - most […]
The success story:
For lunch, I went to Skyways, which is a German bakery a block away from my house that makes tasty sandwiches. It’s also very nice from a bumbling foreigner perspective, because you fill out a little card (in English), hand it to the cashier along with your 20 RMB, and that’s all there […]
OOF oof oof. Survived. Good god, this profession is something else. I was frantically preparing for class until around 11:30 last night (preparation, for me, involves a lot of hand wringing and moaning that I don’t know what I’m doing), and then woke up totally scared and nervous at 4 am and could not fall […]
Well, Friday was the big day - the first time I’ve ever been on tv. I was wrong earlier; it wasn’t really national television. It’s the Jiangsu Province educational network. Anyway, the show consisted of various acts from the large family that is the Jiangsu Ministry of Education (I think). There were twenty performances altogether, […]
Hot damn, it wound up snowing. I was in the office this morning and my department leader was talking about how the weather in China was making news in Missouri. That was exciting, because a. I know where Missouri is, as opposed to just about every other place that people mention to me here, and […]
I’m four days away from a three week vacation, which is absurd to me - I haven’t had this much time off work in my adult life, and I have no idea what I’ll do with all that free time (AHEM. learn Chinese, finally, Miss.). The high point of the Chinese year is coming up […]