Teacher Mode, Activated!

So I'm going to hit you with the bad news first: this is not a blog post about my trip to Shanxi and Shandong province. Instead, I am saving that for my very first vlog post, which should hopefully be up sometime later this week, provided I can make the graceful mental leap from apple video editing software to pc. However, the good news is that I was finally given my teaching schedule for the year, and I know how all of you are waiting with baited breath to hear about that.

So, to satisfy your ravenous curiosity, and without further ado, here it is: in the next year, I will be teaching two different college courses. Specifically, I will be teaching News English and Listening and Speaking. The News English course consists of five sophomore classes, and the Speaking and Listening course consists of four freshman classes, all of which meet once a week in two back-to-back 45 minute sessions, which means I'll be teaching for around 16-18 hours a week.

In reality, though, it sounds like a lot more work than it actually will be. The beauty of teaching only two different courses means that I'll only have to come up with two lesson plans per week, which I can then recycle for all of the other classes. Other perks are that the college wants us to assign as little homework as possible, so there will be nothing to correct or grade. And while they have no set lesson plan or text book for us to work from, it also gives me a lot of leeway in deciding exactly what I want to teach about. My lessons in the Listening and Speaking class can range from food to music to the American education system, as long as I get the students listening and speaking. And the News English course is meant to prepare the students to read newspapers and to understand American News TV, which will be a lot of article reading and showing clips of news, as well as plenty of vocab lessons. Overall, I know it will be plenty of work, but I should also have time left over to take advantage of my time here in China.

As a professor at Jinjiang College, we have access to certain benefits, not the least of which is half-price coffee at the on-campus cafe (excellent lattes for under a dollar!). We also get free Chinese lessons twice a week, access to a 'teacher's only' gym, free tennis lessons (for whatever reason), and oddly enough, a teacher's only karaoke room--where cafeteria workers will bring you drinks and snacks as you sing another off-key Beatle's song. It's definitely not a bad gig, and I'm sure that I'm going to find plenty of ways to occupy my free time.

Finally, when finalizing our schedule, I found out that our break for the Spring Festival extends from mid-January, all the way to late March. I'll be getting over two months of paid vacation, and I plan to spend it visiting my sister and boyfriend in Germany, and hopefully traveling around China a little with my two cousins, if everything works out. Overall, I'm pretty excited about the year to come.

As lessons begin on Monday, I'm off to start making my very first lesson plan. In the week to come, you can look forwards to hearing about my cross-country road trip as well as seeing pictures of my faaaabulous apartment! I know, it's going to be difficult to wait, but you'll just have to try to contain your excitement.