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Published: December 14th 2009
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Class Trip!
on the bus on the way Back to teaching
So, back to teaching and no more holiday until mid-January! Seems a long way away. Teaching carries on as normal, I’m even getting used to getting up at 6.30am every day 😞 .The students are doing well and I hardly ever hear any Chinese in the classroom anymore which is great and the students are happy to discuss anything I give them so it feels like I’ve made progress! Finals are very soon though and then I get 3 new classes of masters’ students and it all starts again. 'Tis quite sad, I like my students!
My Doctoral classes have just doubled :s which is quite hard work. All of their classes finish in week 11 of the semester but mine finishes in week 16, so a month of double classes and we can finish a month early and they can go home. 2.30-6.30pm on a Friday afternoon is a bit much though! So we decided to have a class trip 😉 Bowling & a night out! The students arranged everything (which is lucky when you consider my Chinese…) and I turned up to find a hired bus to take us - It was bizarre getting
At the bowling ally
This is Mary, Me, Alexander & Lucas on the bus and being the teacher on a school trip! Bowling was fun though my bowling was terrible as usual (I did win one game!) and I managed to get in a game with everybody by changing teams for each game (and making sure everybody spoke some English. Andrew turned up for the last few games and put me to shame, 3 strikes in a row towards the end - sickening! Ah well. 😉 We all went out for dinner then and I think it was the best dinner I’ve had in China so far. There were many new dishes to try, some of it really good and lots of fun and lots of toasting - most of it in English! As the special guest, this means lots and lots of toasting. The Chinese tradition is to go around the table (or 2 tables in this case) and toast (down a glass of baijo - a 50% spirit) with each person. With lots of food, I managed to survive! This was followed by a lesson in Chinese drinking games - though they did let me use tea some of the time for this, and some I even did in
Learning a few Chinese games...
You have to guess how many fingers we are going to show (0,5,10,15 or 20) a little like rock, paper scissors. I was surprisingly good at this! :D Chinese - attempting to improve my numbers. It wasn’t only drinking though, I found out lots about my students and managed to get a little English out of just about everybody so a pretty successful night all in all.
I have just begun tutoring a Chinese friend one to one as well, which is very different from teaching a class but is turning out really well. It helps that Mr Li is really nice and has much better English than he thinks he has. Mr Li invited us to go to Tai Chi with him on Sundays so we’ve begun learning some Tai Chi. Our teacher, Miss Drew, is fantastic - apparently she was a national champion a few years back and she won an international competition as well, but she is very nice and happy and friendly (wants to improve her English as well) and is a really good teacher, even though we are just beginning the basics. She is very patient considering she can’t direct us as we don’t understand Chinese and she has to show and help us. But its fun and we’re beginning to make progress.
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