Saturday 30 September 2006

Visiting the market

Yes, another short blog entry. This has been another week of classes. The first thing that I did this week was to play a short piece from NPR. I then discussed it, pretty much line by line, in class and, near the end of class, played it again. As most of you know, talking about movies, for me, gets old fast. It is almost funny that I am teaching a media class.

The reason that I chose a piece from NPR is that it meets several of my requirements. First, the speech is very clear. It meets my time requirements of about five minutes; which, combined with the discussion, turns out to be a 90-minute lesson. It also deals with a real issue. It is not some fictional, or hypothetical, exercise; it deals with real issues.

I used this lesson for my first ten lessons this week, for the second ten lessons I returned to the format of discussing the movie. We also recited another nursery rhyme, "Little Boy Blue." For these rhymes, I first play the rhyme a couple of times, and then I ask the class questions to help me write it on the chalk board, questions like, "who is the poem about?" I then play the relevant section of the poem until they tell me. Then I ask, "What does she (the person singing the poem) want Little Boy Blue to do?" When I have completed writing the poem on the board we then sing the poem several times. Yes, this limits my selections to singable poems.

I also involved the students in a discussion of what they intended to do with their vacation. The first week of October is a national holiday. Quite a few of the students will be staying at the school. Those few who can leave are going home. The question of leaving for the holiday, for most of them, is primarily an issue of finances.

One of my classes

Another class

And another of my classes

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The view form one of my classrooms

Technically, we only have three days off. So, I will be teaching my normal Wednesday class today, Saturday. I only have one class, class 3 on Wednesday. Then, next Sunday I will teach my Friday classes. On Friday I have class 3 and class 5. This leaves me coming up with two filler lessons for class 3 and one for class 5. They are filler lessons because I cannot use them with the other classes. I try to keep my classes on sync in order to reduce prep time. Without having a text, or any other materials, I end up having to create an hour and forty minutes of material for each class.

For this week, I am hoping to show a movie for one of the sessions to my class 3 and then play another NPR broadcast along with songs for the day that I have class 3 and 5. I am hoping that the broadcast will not take the entire class session. It is not easy to find suitable material to play.

On Wednesday another couple of teachers arrived. They are also from Australia and one of them will be teaching at the college where I work, the other will be teaching on the main campus. We did not see them until that evening, at which time we went to dinner with them.

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The new teachers, with Michele and Zeneta turned away from the camera.

On Thursday Zeneta and I took both of the bicycles and rode to a market. On the way back we walked through he open air market and purchased some fresh produce. While we were there we took a few pictures.

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Last night we had some more Internet connection trouble. About 6pm the computers for all of the English teachers lost their connections. It seems that there was a conflict with out IP addresses and a tech had to come over and make some repairs. At that point we, the English teachers, took him, his girlfriend, and Mr. Lou to dinner as a show of appreciation to them for having come over after hours to make the repairs. At dinner I communicated with him a bit. It turns out that he has never heard of wi-fi or 802.11g protocol. However, he is willing to work with me to get it working.

Sunday morning we have made plans, and already purchased tickets to go, first, to Zhengzhou. From there we intend to go to the Shaolin Temple and stay there for the night.

After we go to the temple we will go to the town of Jiao Zou. We are going there to visit the home of one of the two Chinese teachers that will be traveling with us. At this town we will stay at a local hotel.

We will then travel to Lou Lang and visit both the White House Temple and the Longman Caves and then return to Jiao Zou for the night. The next morning we will visit some waterfalls that are near Jiao Zou and spend the day there. On Thursday we plan to return to Xinyang.

Monday 25 September 2006

Welcoming the freshman

Friday was a typical and uneventful day. On Fridays I have only the two classes, and they seemed to go well. I did find out that there will be no resolution to the problem of the classes and the fact that I have too many people to fit into the projection room at least until the new building is completed. Zeneta spent the day wandering around, taking pictures of the freshmen approaching completion of their, "orientation,"...

and meeting new friends.

It is interesting, one of our number had a serious problem. He had a recurrence of kidney stones. He felt that this was causing excruciating pain and went to the campus hospital. It was immediately decided that he could not be treated there and was taken to the local Base hospital. At the Army Base, they did some tests in order to determine the problem, ultrasound and the like, told him how the treatment would cost (450 Yuan) and got started on him right away.

As he said, by comparison, where he is from, with one of the best medical systems in the world, it took him about nine months from initial symptoms to treatment and the total bill came to over 3,000 dollars. Here it took about a day at a fraction of the cost.

I will also take a moment to apologize if it seems that this posting is not up to my usual writing standard of both quality and quantity. I have been feeling a bit under the weather; there is nothing serious, just not chipper. I thought it was a laughable thing when, on Sunday, I met the person that I just wrote about, the person who had just been treated for kidney stones, and the first thing he said to me was, "are you all right man, you look awful." So, enjoy, I am going to go take a nap

The next day, Saturday, I decided that there were a couple of things that I wanted. First, I wanted a charger for my Palm Pilot PDA. I was getting tired of working off of several folded sheets of paper in my pocket. I am used to using my PDA and being without I was a large inconvenience to me. As it happens, it is one of the few devices, that I brought with me, that does not run on the power here in China.

For those that are not aware, the United Stated uses 110 volts, alternating current, (VAC) and the frequency of the alternation is 60 cycles per second, or 60 Hz. In China, and most of the rest of the world, the power is 220 VAC at 50 HZ. On most of your electronic products, you will see something that says, something like, "Input: 100~240VAC 50~60Hz." This tells you that the device can be used anywhere that you can manage to plug it in (except for on some ships, where the power is 440VAC). However, some devices, like the charger for my Palm, says, "Input: 120VAC 60Hz." This means that it will not work here. For those wondering, all of my Apple products can be used here. That is also what we insisted on looking at on the charger for the Video Camera that was purchased for Debra, just before she left.

I attempted to call Peter, a senior that I have spoken to, in order to get someone to go with me. However, I was unable to get him by phone. Zeneta still wanted me to call someone, so I called one of my students, who had given me her phone number, and arranged a time to meet her.

We met her at the main gate. You will notice that we often meet people at the main gate, that is because it is such an obvious and prominent feature of the college. The girl we met was named Summer, she came with two of her friends, Andrea and Leah. When we told them that we were getting off at KFC they began punching on their electronic dictionaries in an attempt to find KFC. I told them that I would show them when we got there(which I forgot to do; however, as we walked by they noticed the sign and all started laughing, at that point they understood).

We then walked to an electronics mall. It was interesting, several floors of a, relatively, large building were filled with little booths, all containing electronic items, computers, and software. There were a lot of different MP3 players and other devices. There were a few printers, but not many, and several places selling computers. The least expensive computers that I saw were about 4700 Yuan and most were more than that.

It seems that each place we stopped to ask about a charger did not have one and they were all convinced that there would not be any in this city. I applied my usual method of wandering and looking. I finally saw what I wanted in a pile of low value items and paid about 23 Yuan for it. I had been expecting to spend more. I also got a memory card for the PDA and Zeneta purchased a USB memory stick while we were there. Having the Chinese speaking girls with us also resulted in the memory stick costing less than had originally been quoted to Zeneta.

The Girls then wanted to go to lunch, so I let them lead. They wanted to go to a place that was on the third floor of a large department store. They had never been there, so, we were a good excuse for them to go. It turned out to be food court type of arrangement.

While were there, Zeneta started looking at a flyer for a linen sale. It was from a different store and none of us were sure where it was. The girls stopped a woman on a bicycle and she led us most of the way there. That was when I found out that none of these girls were from Xinyang and didn't come into town that often. They are all sophomores and it turned out that this trip was a bit of an adventure for them also.

While at the linen sale, Zeneta purchased a couple of pillows. After that we returned to a place to catch the bus back to the University.

When we returned to the university we stopped and dropped off the things that we had purchased and then the girls took us to a nearby river park. We knew it was near; however, we were not sure of the way. It turned out that all we had to do was walk down the alley that is across form the main gate and keep walking. It is a large, but narrow, park that follows the river and has a bridge that crosses it. Portions of it are tiled and others are others are just dirt path through the grass.

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After we left the park the girls left us to go do whatever they wanted to do. Zeneta and I got some ice cream and headed back.

We returned and later that evening decided to go to dinner with Collin and Bronnie. As a group we then headed off.

We made it to, about, the main gate of the campus when we ran into Lilly, the daughter of Mr. Lou, and a friend of hers. We described where we wanted to go and Lilly led. We ended up in a different place than we were trying to go. However, the food was still good and it was an upstairs, private, dining room. Zeneta had me bring our own drinks as she wanted orange juice and these restaurants do not stock juice. It seems to be common and acceptable to bring your own if the restaurant does not have what you want. The evening that we had all eaten upstairs, at the other restaurant, some of the girls had even run off to a nearby shop, during the dinner, to get what we wanted for drinks.

It was at this time that we began forming more concrete plans for the upcoming, weeklong, holiday at the beginning of October. We had already decided on the Longman Caves and the Shiloh Temple. At that point we started working on details. After dinner, Zeneta and I separated from Collin and Bronnie, Lilly and her friend had already left, and returned to the flat.

Sunday we were scheduled to go to an event at the college. We had no real idea what the event was to be. We were under the understanding that it was a general welcome of the new freshmen. I was expecting a series of dry speeches with a bit of entertainment, and, based on what we had been watching the freshmen do, we would not have been surprised to see a pass and review. What we got was very different.

We were seated in font of the stage, in the second row. There were only two rows of seats, each having about twenty seats and thousands of students standing. What we got instead was a rock concert. Different professional entertainers, and students sang a number of different songs. We, the foreign teachers were also brought on stage and introduced to the cheering crowd.

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After we each spoke for a moment, yes, including Zeneta, we returned to our seats and enjoyed the rest of the presentation. Even though it was very loud we all had a good time. About a fifth of the songs were in English and while we were on stage we had each been given a rose.

I then returned and sat up until I learned how to, and successfully completed the process a session where I needed to, rip a MP3 out of a streaming audio feed. Once I figured out what I needed to download and do it was quite simple. I needed this so that I would have more material for my class on Monday.