English Names

So, when I first began teaching English here in Pengshan, I started by teaching only sophomores who were also all English majors. This meant that not only was their English quite advanced, but also that they all had given themselves English names from previous years of study. My freshman, who I began teaching two weeks later, were a different story. Only about one in every ten of them had an English name at all. Therefore, for their first night of homework, I set them to the task of finding an English name.

I found out later that the other foreign teachers had mostly all chosen to give their students a list of English names, which they could choose from. I, on the other hand, decided to let them follow their whimsy. It's a human name, after all--not christening a new element of the periodic table. How strange could it get?

Oh, how wrong I was. And it was the best mistake of my life.

Some of the "English" names that the students chose were obviously just pinyin of various Chinese names, such as Zhu Yi, Xiao Ma, or Lee He. Others were very average American names, like Steven, Sarah, or Jack (so many Jacks). And still others were badly misspelled versions of English names, which the students had evidently only heard before and never seen spelled, such as Criss, Krystal, Bulinda, or Alen. And of course, there's the nature inspired ones, including Leaf, Meteor, Wonder, and Rice.

But it was the truely creative ones that had me chortling with laughter as I created the class roster for each class. Below is a list of my favorite "English" names compiled from my freshman classes:

Faust (yes, it's 'normal', I know. But I just love that someone chose Faust)
Lanetia Wang
Nidhogg
Mr. Obamdon
Lingshaw
Longnius
Panthon
Jacksong
Emerhoucia
Elodie
Roya
Goshen
Scofield
Shellin

But my personal favorite would have to be: Illidan Stormrage. I can just imagine him introducing himself to a forigner: "Yes, hello my name is Illidan Stormrage."
"Call me Illidan."
"Here's your coffee Mr...Stormrage."

I'm not sure if he's confused or a genius.

Reflections After Two Weeks of Teaching

I'm two weeks into my first real job after graduating college, and I have to say...it's a pretty sweet gig. The hours are minimal, I only have to make two lesson plans a week, and the students are amazing. Overall, I'm more that satisfied, and glad of the opportunity to come here.

Of course, everything isn't all peaches and roses, and most of my frustrations so far have had to do with the administrative side of things. The network of administration in China is labyrinthine, with a huge number of people delegating tasks to other people, until no one really knows who is supposed to be doing what. To be fair, this is a very new college (founded in 2006), so it's only to be expected that they're still figuring things out. My first big surprise was when I found out that my News English course had a text book...after teaching two classes. And I only found out because a student was kind enough to let me know. Luckily, the first week I had already planned as an introduction/syllabus week, so it was no great loss. I picked up the textbook on Wednesday after class, and used it over the weekend to plan my next week's lesson...only to discover that the office had given me the student text book. This meant that in a text book comprised solely of listening exercises, I only had the CD for the 'take home' listening part, rendering about 4/5 of the book absolutely useless. I asked the office about it on Monday, but it seems they never saw any reason why I might need a teacher's text book in order to teach a course, and so had never ordered one. Sigh. They are hopefully in the process of rectifying this right now, but I'm planning to make next week's lesson sans textbook, just in case.

Other fun quirks: you can't access teaching rooms outside of the regular class time, so if you want to practice a lesson, or test your powerpoint before class, you are out of luck. Also, teachers have to pay for their own printing, which means that if I want to have a single handout for class, I have to print out over 125 copies and pay for them myself.

Lastly, we had an administrative meeting with the dean of the college, the heads of our departments, and other important people. It was incredibly informative, and gave us tons of information about how we should be structuring our class. The only problem is that this meeting was held two full weeks after class had started. Much of it was information about what we should be telling our students on the first day of class (grading, missing class, etc.), which is pretty difficult to do when the first class has already come and gone. Oh, China.

However, as I said at the beginning, despite these sometimes aggravating, sometimes bemusing peculiarities of teaching in China, I have been having a wonderful time so far. A highlight from earlier this week was Teacher's Day, in which all of the teachers are honored. Students will often give their teachers small gifts, and there was an AMAZING free lunch in the cafeteria, complete with a choice between red wine or Sprite. There was a ceremony for all of the teachers in the afternoon, with speeches by various important people, and all of the teachers received a bouquet of beautiful flowers and a salary bonus.

Seriously, what's not to like about this?

I thought it was a great tradition, and it was great to have a day to really appreciate teachers, who play such an important role in our society and yet largely go unrecognized for it. China can leave me frustrated and bewildered, and yet then I turn around to find something that fascinates and delights me.

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.