To start off this post, as promised, here are some of the latest papers we’ve received from students.

Why Proofreading is Important - Exhibit A

This first essay caused me to laugh for at least 10 minutes the first time I read it. Even now, I sometimes spontaneously burst into laughter just thinking about it. It says, “A new broom sweeps clean, I collected exercise-boobs in time every morning. Teachers all satisfied with my work.”

It’s sort of like a racy postmodern poem gone terribly wrong.

Exercise-boobs and exercise-books have slightly different meanings, but unfortunately, spell-check won’t catch those meanings for you.

Why Proofreading is Important - Exhibit B

I always tell my students not to write “guy” in their papers to refer to people. First, it’s too informal to use in academic writing. Second, (and I never thought this would be a problem until I received the above paper) it’s too easy to make a typo and change your paper into an essay about bad gays. Again, spell-check can’t help you here. Proofreading with your own eyes (or perhaps someone else’s eyes) is important!

And my last paper to share with you today is mainly for the writing teachers out there and any other nerds who hate wordiness in writing. Take a look at this introduction paragraph I received this week:

To Be or Not To Be Concise

“It is interesting that views posing to certain facts can never be uniformed but diversified as many the aspects as a crystal.”

OMG!

For the past two days, I’ve been trying to come up with examples of how to make this student’s writing more concise so I can give them concrete ideas. I’m at a loss. It’s pretty much the wordiest writing I’ve ever seen, and it’s entirely overwhelming. So if any of y’all want to take a crack at stating this sentence more concisely…have at it!

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So funny papers aside, last week was China’s Labor Day, so we had a few days off school. We decided to get out of Tianjin for a couple days of the holiday and visit some of our students in Shandong province (a little south of where we are now in Tianjin).

We rode the train with five students to Jinan, about two hours away. We had dinner with one student’s family, where Matt got to eat this gem:

Fish we ate in Jinan

Then the next morning, we went to a famous sacred mountain with four of the students. The mountain is called TaiShan (or Mount Tai) and probably no one outside of China really knows it, but it’s very famous in China. Apparently there were some important Buddhist things that happened there, but the people on the mountain were more interested in selling things than in telling about the history of the mountain. But we know from the sheer number of people there that it’s an important place. We also know from the fact that we were the only foreigners on the whole mountain that it’s not very famous outside of China.

So many people!

So as the only obvious English speakers on the mountain, we got a whole lot of stares. I was pretty sure some people were going to fall down the stairs because they kept turning around to look at Matt speak English as they walked past. You could see the jealousy/fascination/skepticism on people’s faces as they tried to wrap their minds around a Chinese guy speaking English so fluently!

After visiting TaiShan, we took another train to Weifang to visit one of Matt’s students, Peter (who we did the interpretation contest with back in March. Those of you who get our newsletters saw a picture of us with Peter). Peter’s parents took us to many delicious meals and showed us the famous sights of Weifang, including a whole street that sells kites and a UNESCO heritage site where a guy does ancient-style Chinese painting. Before we left to come back to Tianjin, we went to a tea shop owned by Peter’s parents’ friends. They served us at least 5 different kinds of teas and taught us pretty much everything there is to know about traditional Chinese tea culture. (Stay tuned for a more robust, accurate tea post from Matt in the days to come.)

It was a great holiday away, but like all such holidays, it created a lot of backlog for us when we came back to Tianjin. So we’ve spent the past week and a half catching up on grading, lesson planning, etc. and there’s still more to be done. The last half of the semester should be pretty non-stop as final exams week approaches. We’re very much looking forward to the next holiday…summer vacation!

I’m trying to decide right now if I’m the most fun teacher that my students have ever had, or the worst.

Today we played Big Booty (Click here for an explanation if you’ve never heard of it) for 30 minutes outside. I figured my students needed a break after completing a paper for me, prepping for the TEM-4 (a writing test they must pass to become juniors), and general school.

Well, at least they had a chance to practice their numbers and speaking quickly.

Here’s the video. Warning: it is hilarious. Oh, and rhythm may not exactly…be their strong point.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=620037913768

A couple months ago, a friend told me about all of the different kinds of teas and occasions for drinking tea. It turns out that it’s pretty dang complex, but I’ll give you the rundown of the basics. BTW-I’m not a tea connoisseur, more of a tea noob. Most of what I know about tea comes from Chinese friends telling me about tea.

Green Tea

Oh, the standard at American Chinese restaurants. This kind is supposed to be the lightest in flavor and the “summer” tea. Summer tea, meaning that, if you drink it in the summer, it will cool you down (not quite sure how that works, but okay).

Yes, it does say, "bag dunk"

Flower Tea

Okay, so it is what it sounds like. They literally pick flowers (often chrysanthemums), dry them, and put them into hot water. It’s actually quite good. Flower tea is a Springtime tea (makes sense), and it’s also supposed to be good for women. I didn’t ask why.

This flower tea was picked from an elevation of 3200 meters on a mountain, or at least that's what the box says.

Black or “Oolong” Tea

Another American Chinese restaurant tea standard, this one is the Winter tea. It’s supposed to have the highest caffeine content (though I don’t think that most kinds are equal to a typical Starbucks drink). This kind’s kind of bitter, and not exactly my fave.

This one was a gift from a friend

Red Tea

This is (you guessed it!) supposed to be the Fall tea. I actually only have had this a couple times. I would liken it to Lipton’s with a little bit of fresh soil mixed in. While that may sound a little gross, it’s actually quite good.

So, that’s my tea roundup. Of course, there are many other kinds of teas in China. Next time you go out for Chinese food, enjoy the tea!

Cinderella

We’ve been plugging away at our daily routine here in Tianjin. Classes are going well. This semester, for my undergraduate writing classes, I decided to try focusing the class around a theme. I’m going with fairy tales, emphasizing Cinderella.

So far, we’ve read the Perrault and Grimm Brothers versions of Cinderella and just finished watching Disney’s version last week. It seems to be going well so far, and it’s way more fun to teach than just grammar and essay-writing.

I was afraid the boys would be all like “I’m too cool and manly for fairy tales!” but last week, they were laughing louder than the girls at all of the funny parts of Disney’s Cinderella. (They all thought the mice were hilarious.) After watching Cinderella 4 times over the past week, I have constantly had “Cinderelly, Cinderelly, night and day it’s Cinderelly” or “So this is love…” stuck in my head.

After Disney’s Cinderella turned out to be such a hit with the students, I’m pretty optimistic that the other movies will go over well too. Next week we’re starting Enchanted. Then we’ll talk about some themes that are common in Disney fairy tales and how they’ve shaped Western culture.

After that, we’ll watch Ever After (a remake of Cinderella with a lot less magic, starring Drew Barrymore), learn about some more fairy tales (Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty), and finish up with Into the Woods (a musical that brings together all of the aforementioned fairy tales, and then shows what happens “after happily ever after”).

After we finish all the fairy tales, the students will have to do a creative group project based on a Chinese fairy tale.

Fun stuff!

Cracking Down

My humongous oral graduate classes are going pretty well too. I came down with the stomach flu 2 weeks ago and had to miss all of my Thursday and Friday classes. It was a pretty nasty bug…I basically didn’t get out of bed from Thursday to Sunday.

While I was out, Matt went to my two graduate classes and set up a video camera so they could keep giving their speeches (which is what was scheduled for that week, and I didn’t want to delay it). The 2:00 class was great, but the 4:00 class had some problems with chattering throughout the speeches. I announced on the first day that one of my classroom rules is to be quiet when other students are talking or presenting. My 4:00 class has consistently had problems with being quiet when they’re supposed to be quiet and with following directions in general. When I was in class two weeks ago, and they had started giving speeches, I had to tell them several times to be quiet. Apparently, since I was gone last week, they really got out of hand. Matt thought it was so bad that he decided to stay for the whole class and supervise in order to get them to keep quiet.

I punished them by docking the whole class 10% on their grades for the speech. When I announced the penalty last week after I returned to class, they were all deathly silent for the rest of the speeches. It certainly made the class a lot easier to control! Because let’s face it, with 60 students, it’s a battle to keep things from heading toward mutiny. I was worried that coming down hard on them would make them resentful, but I think it had the appropriate affect of getting them to be respectful and obedient without making them hate me. Now that they know I’m not going to tolerate disrespect, I think the class will be a LOT easier to handle. After I announced the penalty, I felt like it was so much easier to get through the rest of class, and I was even able to dismiss them early instead of just barely getting through everything.

Ikea

Apart from teaching, we discovered the newly opened Tianjin Ikea. It was pretty much exactly like Ikea in the US, so if we wanted to, we could actually decorate our apartment exactly like our apartment back in the US. Matt said that made him feel sadly commercial, so we ended up not doing it. But we did get some much-needed cheap lamps to brighten up our bedroom.

Sign at the Ikea restaurant telling people to clean up after themselves (very counter-cultural in China!)

LOTS of TV

One of the projects I’ve given my graduate students is to watch an English TV series this semester in small groups outside of class and then report to me about their weekly discussions of the TV show.

Since my classes ended up being huge, there were quite a large variety of TV shows that groups chose. I had already seen several of their choices (Awake, Once Upon a Time, Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother, The Office, Lost, Prison Break, Glee, and Lizzie McGuire…yes, being familiar with kids TV sometimes does pay off in my current job of teaching college students!) but there were many more I wasn’t familiar with at all. I tried to watch the pilot episode of all of the ones I was unfamiliar with so I could follow their summaries more easily. As a result, over the past few weeks, I’ve watched (for the first time) at least one episode from the following shows:

Revenge, Two and a Half Men, Sh*t My Dad Says, The Good Wife, The Apprentice, Castle, Desperate Housewives, Good Luck Charlie, The Vampire Diaries, Grey’s Anatomy, and Nikita

I couldn’t find/had zero interest in Cougar Town and Sex in the City, so I just read the summaries of those on Wikipedia. (I’m planning to have a day to talk about American culture and emphasize that most Americans aren’t really like the main characters in those shows…right?)

So my take on all these new shows…The Good Wife, Castle, Grey’s Anatomy, and Nikita were interesting enough for me to actually want to watch the whole show. Grey’s Anatomy is ridiculously addicting…I’m on Season 2 already. The Good Wife just feels so Chicago politics, so that’s a kind of nice(?) memory of home. Castle’s characters are great (love his daughter!) and Nikita is kind of predictable/unbelievable, but the action and storyline are just interesting enough to keep me watching.

The rest are not interesting enough for me to care about watching more than one episode, so I’ll just let my students tell me how those shows go.

For someone who used to hate watching TV, it’s pretty ironic that now, I sort of have to watch TV. At least it breaks up the monotony of grading essays!

Time to take a break from Week Two lesson planning and give an update!

We made it back from Hong Kong safely last week. (Someday we will give an update on our winter break…) And now we are in Week Two of the semester already! Yikes!

So far, neither one of us has been asked to teach any extra classes this semester, so we are both down to only 12 teaching hours. After last semester, of teaching 16 and 18 hours, it feels like a very light schedule.

BUT…

Matt is kicking it into overdrive to study Mandarin this semester, so he’s formally spending at least 6 hours a week studying, and many more “informal” hours reading textbooks, completing “homework” and chatting with people in Mandarin.

And even though I’m teaching two fewer classes this semester, I ended up with the same number of students. Go figure.

That happened because the two graduate-level oral English classes they gave me this semester are comprised of about 60 students each. (Our typical class is only about 23 students.)

Unfortunately, I didn’t know these two oral English classes would be so huge when I planned the assignments, etc. for the semester. I taught two graduate oral English classes last semester, so I just picked the best of the assignments I had given those classes and figured I could recycle a lot for this semester. But the classes last semester only had 20 students. 20 < 60 = EVERYTHING TAKES 3x LONGER. Oh no.

Okay, so that math probably made no sense, but whatevs, I’m an English teacher for a reason.

Anyway, the point is, those graduate classes are kicking my tail right now. Not only do I have to recalculate how and when I’m going to give/grade assignments this semester, these classes are also a huge drain on my energy.

Which brings me (finally) to my title.

When we were students at Wheaton, we had to take personality-type profile tests at least once a year for various clubs and activities.

Over the years, some things changed in my personality profile, but what always, always stayed the same was “I” (introvert). Basically, this means that I gain energy from being alone, and I expel a lot of energy when I’m with people. (As opposed to extroverts, who, you guessed it, are the opposite – gaining energy from being with people, but losing energy when they are alone.)

Honestly, my introverted nature is what always kept me from wanting to be a teacher. I didn’t think I could handle the stress of standing in front of people interacting with them for hours every day.

But I’ve been able to cope with it a lot better than I expected…until now.

I’ve gotten used to standing in front of 20-25 people, making jokes, keeping their attention…performing, if you will. I kind of turn into a different person when I’m in the front of my classroom.

But with these huge oral English classes, I have to talk into a microphone. And not just any microphone. A non-hand-held microphone that is attached to a very short cord on the podium/humongous desk that contains a computer and other electronic things that connect to the projector in the room. (I’ll try and take a photo this week so you can visualize it.)

Basically, I’m stuck in one spot, one position the whole class time. And these two class periods (with 60 students each)…they’re back to back. From 2 to 6 p.m. every Thursday. So I get to spend about 4 hours in a row talking into a microphone.

It pretty much sucks. The energy out of me, that is.

To make matters more complicated, I decided to try out this amazing website called Prezi to make my powerpoint presentation for the first week. Prezi’s awesome, but unfortunately, it’s not as simple to change things in it as it would be to delete a few slides in Powerpoint on the spot. I really had no idea this class would have so many students until I showed up to class. (The English department sent me incomplete class lists before the semester started.) So a few of the grades I told them I would give them (attendance, participation) that would be awesome in a class of 20 are a bit more challenging in a class of 60. Unfortunately, I already had those grades built into my presentation, and there was no way to skip over them or change the criteria. Thus, I will be attempting to figure out how to take attendance of 60 people every week, and how to make sure everyone even has time to participate once during the semester. I have some ideas, but this whole thing is requiring a lot more thought than I expected.

And since these students are graduate students, they’re much more eager to practice English (as opposed to our undergraduate students, who are usually too shy or unmotivated).

In the 2:00 class last Thursday, when I opened it up for questions, one girl asked if I was going to plan any field trips this semester. Um, no, not for 60 students, thank you. I told her if she wants to plan outings for the class, I’m more than happy to join them, but I will not be organizing anything myself.

When I walked around the classroom taking their pictures (so that perhaps one day I can learn their names…we’ll see how that goes), two girls in the front row said, “Teacher, we like you very much! Can we come visit you at your apartment?” How could I say no to that?

A girl in the 4:00 class came up to me after class. “You know, we had a foreign teacher last semester, and he never took attendance. He didn’t care if we participated or slept during class…” (I had told them, like I tell all of my classes, that if they sleep in class, I will call on them and embarrass them. Little did I know, I wouldn’t be able to see the back half of the classroom well enough to know if they were sleeping. Oh well, hopefully they don’t realize that.)

Anyway, so I thought this girl was going to start complaining about how I was so strict, and I should relax and let them have more freedom like their last foreign teacher.

But no, she went on to say, “I’m so glad we have a teacher like you now, who wants us to come to class and participate! I think that’s so great! Maybe during the next class we can move all of the desks into a U-shape, so that the people in the back don’t have to be so far away from you. I got here a little late today, so there were no empty seats, except in the back, and I wish I could see you better while you’re talking.”

It’s super encouraging (one one level) to hear these things. I’m really glad that I can give them exposure to a native English speaker and help them have a fun, engaging class. But it’s also (on my introverted level) incredibly draining.

By the time the 4:00 class was over, I was literally reeling. My hands were shaking, and my mind was going a million miles a minute. Matt thought I had gone a bit crazy, which is partially true.

So needless to say, Thursday nights will now be veg nights for me. I will need to detoxify from so much time with so many people. Maybe one day I will get used to speaking to groups of 60 people in a microphone, just like I’ve gotten used to speaking naturally to 25 people. But the true miracle will be if  this experience can make my “I” change to an “E” in those personality tests.