The 'teaching' continues...

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I had my first four proper lessons last week.

During the first lesson I spoke for 10 minutes about the section of the textbook I had decided to teach them and then gave them some exercises to do. The topic I spoke about was "the writing process" and it really only took 10 minutes to explain. However, one student told me that I should talk more and then give them the exercises to do at home. I think she was right.

In the second lesson I therefore decided I would take as long as possible to talk about "the writing process". The first slide took a full ten minutes to explain and I thought the students must have understood it. However, immediately after finishing this slide a student put his hand up and asked if I could give them some examples. I therefore made them perform their own stages of the writing process during the lesson. This took 1.25 hours.

I repeated this for the other 2 lessons.

During the lesson we also came on to the subject of homework. I am supposed to set them homework but I have not been told how much to give. I therefore thought I'd ask the students how much I should give them. When I asked this I would get various answers. Some would say 30 minutes, some one hour, some two hours and some one hour a day. I therefore decided to give them the task of reading English text for two hours a day for the next week. There was much chuckling at this proposal.

During a lesson I also asked one of my students where she got her glasses from and how much they were becase my glasses are on their last legs and soon I will need some new ones. She told me that they cost her 150 yuan (£15!!) from a glasses market in Beijing. I asked her if glasses were that cheap in shops as well as glasses markets and she told me that on important dates, like national day which is coming up on October the 1st, the shop might give me a "treat" and let me buy the glasses for cheaper than normal. She later informed me that a "treat" meant a discount.

In other news...

It's still very hot here. I've got used to it and I don't really notice it but I realised how hot it still is when i found myself being refreshed by the air from an air conditioning unit in one of the classrooms i teach in - the air con was set to 27oC!!

I got my X-ray back from the medical exam. I think i will put it on my wall. Wil, Jemima and I also noticed that we all had a dark area (to greater and lesser degrees) on our lower abdomen. We intend to figure out what this. Wil suggested that it might be liver damage.

I also now have a little "foreign experts" book and a Residence permit. This means I can go in and out of China as I wish until July 10 next year. Hurray.

I went out with a friend last night for a general chat. It was nice. We went to Starbucks (which stays open until 11pm) and she bought me some mooncake, a Chinese delicacy. I sent her an email today saying that I enjoyed her company - She sent me an email back saying that I had treated her like a machine, had been staring at her like an animal and studying her like an object. Ha! Ha!

I start Chinese lessons tomorrow. The university runs a Chinese language course and they are allowing me to join in for free which is very nice of them. Lesson begin at 8am and finish at 11.35, I will be doing them on mon, tue and fri. Not on wed or thur because thats when I teach. This does mean that I will be up and doing something by 8am every morning, which is good.

Finally, I have decided that I won't be going to Thailand this janary because the girl I was going to see has "got marry and stay in Germany". Instead I'm going to save up for a trip to Korea and Japan, maybe even Taiwan. I should also enjoy China while I am here.

Bye Bye.

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