Today marked the first day of our second week of school here. I made it through the first week okay but today both of my classes told me the books are boring and they want to just know about America. The hard part is that most of my students have been studying for at least 8 years and their spoken and written English is…sub par to say the least. I am not sure if the determining factor has been that most of their English training has been done by non-native English speakers or if there is some other unknown. From our experience, speaking decent English is not a requirement to be an English major, work in an English department at a college, or teach English to children. We are struggling with how best to help them learn and keep them interested. That is always the teachers' problem though. I ended up only teaching 3 days at the middle school last week. The students knew more English than we were told they did so it was nice to do more than the A, B, C's. Do not be fooled into thinking that there are no discipline problems with Chinese students! I am sure language barriers can be part of the problem such as when they don't understand what you are asking but they are pretty typical kids. They do have to do military training as well, which is a little intense. The biggest difference at their school was that the students are pretty much self-run. They have different bells for the start and end of class. When the bells ring, the students know what to do. They have 4 45-minute classes with 10 minute breaks before lunch. Then, they have 2 1/2 hours off for lunch and they can leave campus. They return for 3 more 45 minute classes and school ends at almost 5pm.
At the college, our students have similar schedules. They start classes at 8am and they go until almost 5, with the same long break at lunch time. They are enrolled in 16 classes each term which meet for 2 hours a day each. It is more like a full-time job when compared to the college schedules I am familiar with in the states. This is the last week of military training for the freshman. They have morning work from 5 to 7, break for breakfast, regroup at 8, work until 12, then regroup again in the afternoon and sometimes go until the early evening. They also do training on the weekends. Apparently after freshman year it is no longer compulsory. All of the freshman are easily identified because they wear white and red track suits around campus every day.
As for life here, I am still waiting for a computer or for someone to figure out what I mean when I ask for the program to install the Internet host onto my laptop. I am practically living in Andreana's apartment for the company more than anything. We were without Internet all together for all of last week which was pretty terrible. We do try to get out and see more of the city when we can. The biggest restriction on that is that we are locked in at night. Supposedly it is for our own safety, but protection from whom we are not sure. The hours on curfew were supposed to be changed, but as we were locked in at 10pm last week, they apparently aren't. We just climbed over the wall, which wasn't easy. The difficulty factor skyrocketed when we came back to a very angry Grandfather - our keeper. He reported back to Bob that it was Clyde and students from the Middle School so that was a little confusing. Andreana and I are small, but not that small. We ran into this problem with the gate again on Saturday. We went to this Province's capital city, Nanchang for the day and didn't return until 11. At least by that time, we had a borrowed key to get back in. Nanchang was definitely more of a city than Pingxiang. There were many more people, tons of shopping, and a Walmart. There were KFC's on every corner, McDonal's, and even a Pizza Hut (which we should have gone to). The Walmart was the reason we went - in hopes of American products. Walmart in China is worse than you might imagine. There were roughly a million people on the escalators to get up. Then we had to physically fight people to get lockers for our backpacks. As elsewhere in China, there isn't enough for everyone and waiting in line just doesn't happen. At least we were roughed up a little after having to fight to get a table and our lunch. We survived Walmart but weren't too impressed. They did have some American products, but it was all about $30 each. $30 for a small jar of Prego, for a small thing of Jiffy, for a package of Pringles...you get the idea. We wandered around the city a bit as well and saw what there was to see. We took a crazy packed bus there than rode home in the luxury of a charter bus. The train station in Pingxiang was pure insanity. Not liking lines is a big part of that, the love of chaos and a gabillion people help too. People were climbing over the chairs and running people over to get to through the gate onto the platform. Apparently seats are first come, first serve, but the companies sell more tickets than seats so some people just stand for the whole trip. Our trip was only 4 hours, but Andreana said she did an overnight trip before and met people who didn't have seats who were traveling for over 30 hours. That would be another prime example of insanity. After this week, there are 2 more weeks of school before we get a week off. We get a full week off in May as well. We are hoping to use those times to travel a bit! The break between terms is almost 6 weeks long so that will be AMAZING! Japan is the only thing that is really planned for now and that will be in April. We are tossing around some other ideas. The hard part, other than having shotty Internet and not speaking Chinese, is that tickets for buses and trains cannot be purchased online. Our language classes are supposed to start this week, so that will be good. Right now my Chinese is limited to ordering things - "one", "two", "three", "how much", "a little", "I don't want"...all of the basics. New pictures were added to 3 albums...enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment