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
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.
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.
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.
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