Journal Entry - March 29, 2007
Since my last journal entry, we have gotten very busy. We haven’st gone on any trips or had any festive events, but our our schedules have started to fill up and we’re feeling a little frazzled lately. We’ve added more teaching and learning to our lives and don’t have much down time anymore.
I have started what in the U.S. would be called an intensive Chinese class. Here it’s just normal. Pierre, one of the other foreign teachers, and I have class every Tuesday and Thursday from 9:00 to 11:45 with a teacher trained in teaching Chinese to foreigners. Teacher Liu is very good and very demanding in the amount of work that he gives us. I feel like I’m learning a lot, but I also feel like much more is dropping on the floor, to be sorted out later when I have the time. Every time I leave class my brain is so full I can barely remember how to get to lunch. I think that our students live with this all the time. Most of the Chinese people that I deal with on a regular basis have remarked on the improvement in my ability, so I suppose the class is working.
Gina and I have apparently gotten a reputation as teachers. We’ve had a request to teach at a private English language school. These schools are common, and are among the many things with which Chinese parents fill their children’s hectic and pressured lives. At first, they wanted me to teach middle schoolers once a week in the evening and I said no. Then they wanted Gina to teach once a month on a Sunday all day. Then that invitation was extended to me. Eventually, we gave in to the pressure and decided once a month was okay. The teaching was fun. We actually team teach the same classes in the morning and then have separate classes in the afternoon. My students especially are the cream of the crop and for the most part eager to learn. The only problem is that it fills yet another day. We did it for the first time this last Sunday, and our planning for the next week’s university classes suffered a bit.
Speaking of university classes, we have run up against an issue that apparently plagues foreign teachers in China: cheating. Our classes can be divided very roughly into two types, small intimate groups that we develop personal relationships with, and big rooms full of nameless student units. This is an oversimplification, but it will serve to describe the problem. In the smaller classes, we tend to engage in interesting activities, a lot of role playing, and give the students many opportunities to speak in class. In the larger classes, which are all graduate reading classes, we tend to give them material to read and then quiz them. The problem is that they cheat on the quizzes.
Last semester the reading classes had 80 students each, and it was impossible to do anything at all about the cheating without driving ourselves completely crazy and turning into the type of teacher that we don’t want to be. This term, the classes are only about 40 students, so we have decided to crack down. Between Gina and I, we have seven reading classes, and we plan them together, using the same material. This includes the quizzes. Unfortunately, the classes that meet earlier in the week have been revealing the quiz answers to the classes that meet later in the week. We’ve had to write a different quiz for each class, which has added to our workload. They’re very ingenious so we assume that we’ll have to figure out some other scheme for future quizzes. It’s definitely an us-versus-them struggle to keep them from cheating.
We haven’t been completely buried. The weather is starting to warm up, and the other day we went for a bicycle ride into the country side with a group of students. It wasn’t far, but the land is quite beautiful. I’ll end with a few pictures.
