Wow, I'm bad at this blogging thing...

Okay, folks. I'm just writing as it comes to me because I have a bunch of nervous/excited productive energy right now, but I'm taking a break from lesson planning to write a blog post. This will probably not be constructed in any kind of logical order. Right now, I have no idea whether it will be long and rambling or way too short. The fact of the matter is that today is one of those rare productive days where I dust off the things I meant to do and actually try to do them. Sometimes a problem can be so absorbing that it is just time consuming when it should be discarded--such as earlier today, when I was trying to navigate the Chinese operating system on this computer to take a block of text out of a PDF file so that I could have a really neat print-out of the International Phonetic Alphabet for my students, and I ended up spending about an hour on it without getting anywhere--so I don't really know if I'll end up talking a lot or typing some and then being reminded of the other things I have to do. Honestly, I would normally just say I'll try to be brief (even if I'm not) in the interest of those reading, but I won't make any promises one way or the other this time around. Prepare to be confused.

Okay, so...where to begin? My last post (not counting a slightly more recent post that we decided should be deleted since it looked like I may have been making fun of the Party Secretary here) was basically about classes going to begin soon. Well, classes have been going on for awhile now. Finn and Katherine both have groups of freshmen--Katherine with a group or two of upper-classmen to balance it out, and Finn with all new students. This means that they did not have to begin their real workload until three weeks into the teaching, and then they had one scanty week until our just-finished week-long October Holiday. I don't have any newbies, so I've been teaching a pretty full schedule. A fuller schedule, in fact, than I should have by what my contract stipulates. The upshot, though, is that my classes end earlier, so I only have to make up two classes ahead of time in order to return to America in plenty of time for my big brother's wedding, which is much more manageable than it would have been otherwise! You're welcome, Ryan! Finn and Kat will have a harder time making sure their schedules are cleared out for that time window, but I'm able to work hard in the beginning and relax toward the end, which isn't that bad considering that by the end of the semester we'll be teaching in unheated classrooms in freezing temperatures. I'm not complaining.

What can I say about my students? Although I want this to be the "family blog" and not just my own individual blog, I can't really speak about Finn and Kat's students because they have already done so (I think) themselves! Besides, I don't know their students personally, so I wouldn't dream of taking that pleasure away from them. So instead, I'll talk about my students. Is that okay? I hope it is, because you don't have a choice. (You could stop reading and go look at something else on the Internet, I guess, but let's pretend you don't have that option.)

My students...

My students are awesome. Yes, there are some who won't show up to class or who will put their heads down when they should be listening to the audio lesson and checking answers, but what classroom doesn't have those? The fact of the matter is that the whole lot of them is sweet, kind, and polite to a fault. If I ever called a student out publicly on missing class too much and made a deal out of it, he or she would be completely mortified and would probably never miss again. I don't want anyone to be mortified, of course, but I also want them to attend, so I'm still trying to feel out the culture and strike the right balance. As for the "good" students in my class, which means those that are angels instead of mere saints, I could have used just one of those in each classroom in Arkansas to create a behavioral revolution. Okay, maybe that's a little on the hyperbolic side, but these students are awesome. Their schedules are filled to the brim, such that if I want to make up a class period we've missed (or preteach one we are going to miss), I'll have to do it probably after 9 pm or on a weekend. But even so, any student would gladly spend all of their precious, limited free time to take me into the shops in town and help me buy a cell phone, get a hair cut, or whatever else I ask for. To top it all off, they would never even give a hint that they felt exasperated or obligated to perform this task; they would be all smiles. Even if they truly felt this way on the inside (exasperated, that is), they would sooner slap me in public than make their feelings evident, so it's very hard to tell when they are happy to help and when I am being a burden! But all of this business (the state of being busy, not commerce) isn't because different students within a class have different schedules that need to be reconciled--every group of students in a class has the exact same schedule, and they take all of their classes with the same group throughout the day. It's like elementary school in America, I guess, but on a college level. It's a lame comparison, I know, but it's the sort of thing that will take too long for me to explain to my satisfaction. Suffice it to say that if one student doesn't have free time at a given time, none of them do--they're all in it together.

Apparently, my students already love me. This may be just them saying this to get into my good graces, but what can I say? I'm a sucker for flattery. According to them, however, I make them feel much more comfortable and unafraid about practicing their English than their previous English teachers. I try to have a relaxed atmosphere in class--not casual per se, but with a strong dose of positive reinforcement for ANY answer, even wrong ones. As I love to point out to them, you'll never learn English if you never use it, so the student who speaks up and gives a wrong answer is a better student than the one who has the correct answer but never says anything! I also enjoy pointing out to them that their English is better than my Chinese, so they don't need to be embarrassed about their pronunciation, accent, or word choice when speaking with me. I'll have to find a way to keep this atmosphere alive while also correcting their utterances, so wish me luck on that front. I feel very optimistic about it, though; the material (the students, that is) that I have to work with here is much better than what I have ever worked with, even with the language barrier. I am grateful every day that I have such wonderful people to work with, and all I can do is thank God and pray that He will make me a better teacher so that I will be worthy of these wonderful students! I suppose that I should end my description of how awesome my students are by simply saying that they are so awesome, I am getting an inferiority complex as a teacher. I feel like people this bright and attentive deserve the best minds in the universe to be their teachers, not foreigners with bad lesson planning skills like me!

Which brings me back to something I mentioned earlier; I'm supposed to be putting together a lesson plan for tomorrow. Once it is finished being put together, I can't WAIT to start the next unit: pronunciation. I don't have a real plan or outline for the whole semester, just a book with no extra notes for the teacher and almost no comprehensive guidance. But as I've been going through these books, I've realized that even though some students are worried about the IELTS (an English-language competency test they will have to pass next year) and will raise a fuss if I deviate from the largely unhelpful IELTS books, they badly need to spend some time on pronunciation. Most of them have electronic Chinese-English dictionaries with phonetic symbols to help with pronunciation, but the students don't even know which sounds are associated with these symbols. So, I just began putting together some materials to begin teaching them the IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet. Once I can organize the information well enough, and make enough handouts for all of my students, and once the students study and learn these symbols and their associated sounds, then any word in English that is giving them trouble will simply need to be transcribed into IPA format and they will know exactly which sounds they should be making. I don't know how to go about finding out what vocabulary they need and teaching it to them in a meaningful manner, but no matter how good their vocabulary is, they all need help with pronunciation, so I am deeming this to be the Next Big Thing. Once they learn the IPA, we will then be moving on to pronouncing problem words/sounds in the English language, especially those that present particular difficulties for non-native speakers (such as the "th" in "thanks"). I am excited because this is one way in which a teacher can have instant gratification and hear improvement very quickly. I am also excited because my Chinese students LOVE working on pronouncing words.

I haven't done any comprehensive pronounciation practice yet, of course, but I've halted class to drill them once or twice when we've come across particularly difficult consonant clusters in English, such as in the family name/proper noun "Griffiths." When your "th" already sounds like an "s", the "ths" ending sound can be pretty difficult. So I had them all stop what they were doing, wrote some things on the board, and promptly began telling them to make funny noises and stick their tongues out between their teeth. I kept cajoling and guiding until most of the class was producing the correct noise, then I described what making that noise should feel like inside your mouth--where the air pushes against, where the tongue is, whether the teeth are together, whether any parts of the mouth are contacting any others--until I could see comprehension dawning. Although the drill was pretty informal and I would be surprised if any of them can now correctly recall the exact pronounciation, at least by the end of the class I had just about every student pronouncing this difficult English name perfectly. The best part is that they love it. What student doesn't love to stop listening to his or her professor and make funny noises? And since it's fun and interest-grabbing, it will also hopefully be far more educational than any dry lecture or presentation of mine could possibly be.

Well, true to form (for those who know me), I've wandered. A lot. I'm going to wrap up now, even though I haven't breathed a word about our trip this past week to Qingdao in eastern China, even though I haven't mentioned any of the thousand little things here in China that make everyday life here both irritating and almost unbearably wonderful. I won't tell you about these things, at least not tonight. I won't even tell you WHEN I will tell you about these things. Just write me an e-mail, prompt me, nag at me when it's been too long...and I'll write again. I'll try to do it without outside prompting, but the fact of the matter is that life here can take up every single MOMENT of your time in a meaningful way if you play your cards right, and that makes you really want to spend a lot of time practicing your card-playing skills. Just know that I love all of you--yes, even you, Guy I Don't Know Who Is Reading My Blog. I know you're out there. All of us here wish all of you the very best, even if we don't get online much to say it, and we promise--we really do--that we will try to keep in touch. But it's a two-edged sword: if you have a computer and an internet connection, download Skype this instant and send us your contact information so we can talk! Failing that, write us an e-mail, post a comment, or do anything to let us hear from home. And on a final note, before I forget, know that we ask for you to pray for us and our teaching. Things are starting off slowly, but I know great things will happen. Four students have already approached us, asking to Study (winkwink!) with us. Once we begin announcing study times at our apartments to all of our students, I'm sure this number will increase greatly. I desperately wish I could tell you more, and I honestly can't wait to tell you in person all that we have seen and experienced.

Take care, please leave your comments, and please tell the others to read this blog. Our schedules are beginning to settle into a routine now, so I PROMISE that this will be updated regularly! Until then, be safe, be kind, and be happy.

-Luke