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Published: November 25th 2012
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Okay to be honest the second week of teaching didn’t get off to a good start. The topic was television which should have been fun and fairly simple to organise. The plan was to show various pictures of different types of television show and then elicit the vocabulary from the students filling in any gaps myself. This failed from the get go due to a technical issue. I don’t have access to a printer but each classroom has an electronic OHP so I made a slide show on PowerPoint to use. I get into the classroom introduce the subject and then start up the PowerPoint…or at least I attempted to. It wouldn’t work. For some reason the version on my computer was not compatible with the one that is on the schools computers. There went my entire lesson out the window. I had to resort to drawing in the board (not my strongest point) and describing. This was fairly difficult to do as no English language television series are shown in China not even the really famous ones like LOST. I did however bring my television guide so the lesson was not a complete waste of time. After this first lesson
I quickly adapted the lesson for the other classes so that it flowed more smoothly. Panic over to an extent. I left the first class with the promise that the next lesson would be much better and that we would be using the text book so they would have something to reference.
Having thought all my problems were solved I woke up the next morning thinking that I’d have another look at my PowerPoint and try and change the version so that is would work in the classroom. I opened up my USB only to have a mild panic attack. All my files were gone they had somehow been deleted during my battle with technology the previous day. I seriously wanted to cry. I quickly went to Laura to see if she would know how to fix it and luckily the school has as Laura described him ‘a technical expert’. My files were reinstalled on my USB and I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. With technical problems sorted the week went on as usual with some classes infuriating me with the complete disregard of what I asked them to do and others being a pure joy to
teach.
Once the week of teaching was over I set my mind to something more soothing. Baking bread. Now as many of you will know the Chinese don’t really have bread in the same sense that we do. They have steamed bread. Now as I don’t have an oven I felt this was the time to broaden my horizons and attempt to make some bread Chinese style. I looked up several recipes trying to find one that I felt was fairly simple and not too time consuming…there isn’t one. All the recipes included having to make a ‘starter dough’ and then a waiting period of at least two hours to let all the dough rise. This did not however deter me as I really having nothing better to do with my weekend than cook, clean and sort out my lessons for the next week. I have to say that I was fairly impressed with the results. Though the recipe I was using was meant to make 24 and I only managed to get 16 out of it and they were rather small I still mark it as a success. What do think? I have to say they tasted really good and though the prep time is fairly long the cooking time was very short only about 25 minutes. They taste best when they’re warm with some honey yum yum.
I also received my first home visit from some students which was kind of nice and a bit awkward as I wasn’t entirely sure of what the rules were about students being in my apartment. The next day when I had to meet with the principal I quickly checked where the school stood on this issue and he said it’s fine as long as it is not late at night and the students come in groups. Also boys can only come in a group if there are girls with them. My mind was put at ease that I wasn’t going to get into trouble for having a mini powwow with some girls for over an hour in my apartment. This week coming the topic is travel, safely organised around the material from the book so hopefully it will go to plan unlike the television lesson…I’ll let you know.
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