It's monday morning, do you know where your teacher is?

The Hua Hang Lake

This morning marked the start of my third week teaching in China.  It's amazing how quickly time flies by.  The freshmen just arrived on the campus this last Friday and all the welcome festivities have died down.  Now it's straight to three weeks of intensive military training for these young guys and girls.  I don't envy them.  As my friend Sunny said, "It's three weeks of torture."  I can sympathize. These young students have to stand at attention and march around from 6:00 AM until 6:00 PM with only two hours off in-between for lunch.  The weather has been fairly nice but still it hasn't been cool enough to want to stand in the sun all day.  Some of the fortunate few get to drill in the shade but not all.  They all just look so young in their brand new blue camouflage uniforms and their bold colored running shoes.  Today I saw one girl marching in pumps... now that's dedication to fashion!  Training will end soon enough and freshmen classes will begin.  This term I was not chosen to teach any freshmen courses.  Rather, my schedule was filled with sophomores and juniors.  So I have the students who have just enough knowledge to no longer be bright-eyed anymore and too much knowledge to stay awake in class.  Ah, but I kid.  I've got great students.  I'm teaching four sections of Contemporary English and two sections of Business English.  Most all of my students are pretty attentive and well behaved in class. They all are still very shy but I'll break them of that soon enough. My teaching methods include using the textbooks and a partial lecture (20 minutes tops).   But lectures are boring (even mine) so I shift my main focus to discussion, songs, and games.  I'm a firm advocate of hands on teaching, which can be a real challenge with 44 students in a given classroom. Group games are a must.  So far we have played “Shark Tank” and “Would I Lie to You” in the classrooms.  Both are inspired by the similarly named television shows with a twist for classroom application:

Shark Tank
For this game I randomly choose four students to serve as the show judges.  The rest of the students are gathered into four-person teams.  The teams then must pick an object from the classroom to sell as their product.  This involves come up with a cleaver sells pitch for the judges.  I've seen students do everything from everything from commercials, to runway style product demonstrations, and even skits acting out the products uses. The judges then get to ask questions of the groups and they get to decide if they want to invest in the product or not.  It's a lot of fun and the students really get into the competitive nature of the game.

Would I Lie to You
For this game I divide the class into teams of four.  Each team selects a storyteller who will come to the front of the classroom.  The storyteller then gets the option to tell either a true or false story.  The rest of the class gets to ask questions of the storyteller.  After the questions round, the classroom then gets to guess if the storyteller is telling the truth of a lie.  Each team is given a point for correctly guessing the nature of the story.  However, the storyteller gets an extra point for their team if they can fool all the other teams. 

Songs
I try to choose fairly easy songs to sing and I find myself being drawn this semester to the Decemberists and the Avett Brothers.  Tomorrow I will teach them, “Down by the Water,” which has a rather folksy feel to the music.  It reminds me a lot of Creedence Clearwater Revival (another great band).  Last week I played an acoustic guitar version of The Backstreet Boys’ song, “I Want It That Way.”  I also played this song for my sister over Skype and she said it was the manliest version of The Backstreet Boys she had ever heard!  My students told me yesterday that they all downloaded the song after I taught it to them and they’ve been going around singing all over campus!

Building 8

Building 8 and Me

Student dorms and shops along the main road.

River Hang i.e. "Hua Hang"

Graffiti of the school's acronym N.C.I.A.E.

Which way to my classroom?

Bikes everywhere!

All Marilyn Monroe needed was a good book.

The School Cafeteria

Some stone cold reading.

Me and Confucius

"Welcome to school.  Now, march you maggots!"

The freshmen are out marching.

Into the Shark Tank

"I want it that way!"