This past week in Beijing was pretty eventful.<\/p>\n
Since my last post, my teaching workload has doubled!\u00a0 I began my teaching at Sinopec.\u00a0 I have a group of eight men, ages 30-45.\u00a0 They all have degrees in engineering or chemstry.\u00a0 None of them are from Beijing so they are all going to school away from their families.\u00a0 It is interesting to know that this happens all of the time.\u00a0 A husband and wife may not live in the same city if it is financially beneficial for the family.\u00a0 My Sinopec men are just a few examples of this.\u00a0 They are all in school for seven hours a day learning English.\u00a0 I am only a small portion of their education here.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My first class on Tuesday was interesting.\u00a0 It takes me 52 min. to get from the door of my apartment to my classroom.\u00a0 It may be different on other days depending on how long I have to wait for the subway.\u00a0 I arrived early because Mr. Wang wanted to meet with the teachers before our first class.\u00a0 There are eight of us teaching conversational\/oral English to different groups of men.\u00a0 I was the only female teacher this week.\u00a0 My roommate will be joining us next week.\u00a0 I also think it is very interesting to see the different perspectives of English that these men will get.\u00a0 Of the eight teachers, six of us are from the states, one is from England, and one is from Australia.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After our meeting with Mr. Wang, we jumped right into teaching!\u00a0 I really had no idea what to expect.\u00a0 Their English level is fairly low.\u00a0 I had my lesson planned out for a group that would be willing to talk.\u00a0 This is not that group.\u00a0 They were really timid on Tuesday.\u00a0 I don’t know if it was because they were nervous or just uncomfortable with me.\u00a0 It was challenging to fill 3.5 hours of time with a group that doesn’t participate.\u00a0 During our first break, they all just chatted away in Chinese! Ha!\u00a0 I now know that they are not shy or timid.\u00a0 Mr. Wang came during break to see if things were going well.\u00a0 The men must have told him that they were having a hard time understanding me.\u00a0 He said, ‘they like your accent but you speak pretty fast. Maybe you could speak slower.’\u00a0 Speaking slowly is definitely a learned skill.\u00a0 For those that know me well, this will be a challenge for me.\u00a0 I know that this is what they need in order to understand me and will strive to do it.\u00a0 However, it is hard for me to speak slowly (ridiculously slowly) to a group of men who are very smart.\u00a0 Understand the dilemma?\u00a0 For a good chunk of the class we talked about the United States and things about my family and me.\u00a0 They had many questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After class, I made my journey to the subway and met the previously mentioned Nebraskan man.\u00a0 We chatted the whole way to his stop. (one stop before mine)\u00a0 This made the ride much more bearable.\u00a0 I made it home and after eating some supper I crashed!\u00a0 I love taking unexpected naps when they are not right before bed.\u00a0 Hmmm…\u00a0\u00a0 I woke up around 9:30 pm and had a\u00a0hard time sleeping that night.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I had Wednesday off from teaching but it felt like the never ending planning day.\u00a0 I wanted to make sure to maximize my time with the engineers.\u00a0 Most of the day was spent with them in my thoughts.\u00a0 I’m hoping that planning gets easier and less time-consuming so that I can enjoy the days that I have off between teaching days.\u00a0 Other things that happened on Wednesday: visiting the market to pick up a bag that I had custom made (with help from another teacher), supper with friends at La Bamba, and our groups’ Wednesday gathering.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thursday’s class went much better than Tuesday’s.\u00a0 I made a point to take my time in all of my speech and eliminate unnecessary speech.\u00a0 The group was also a little less timid today.\u00a0 They did roleplaying, they asked each other questions, they discussed.\u00a0 I think that maybe they are more comfortable with me.\u00a0 We even had lots of laughter during the class.\u00a0 I can’t wait until I get to see them again on Tuesday!<\/p>\n
On Thursday night I visited my first song study.\u00a0 It was fun to see the different levels of English and how the Chinese help each other understand things during study.\u00a0 At the end of the song study, I received a call from Mr. Wang about my teaching schedule.\u00a0 Earlier in the week he told me that I would be teaching American and British Culture at the Forestry University.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 What do I know about British culture?\u00a0 So, once again I was excited and a little nervous about this.\u00a0 But before I even had a few days to think about how I would teach it, Mr. Wang called and said that I would be teaching Business English at Qinghua University. (pronounced Tsinghua)\u00a0\u00a0 Business English?!?!\u00a0\u00a0 I keep trying to remind myself that this may change in the next few days.\u00a0 Who knows?!<\/p>\n
Highlights of the week: my Saturday 7th graders, Sunday service, biking down 3rd Ring Road between buses and cars that are moving, biking across 4th Ring Road during a traffic standstill and weaving between vehicles, late-night chuar with friends!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This past week in Beijing was pretty eventful. Since my last post, my teaching workload has doubled!\u00a0 I began my teaching at Sinopec.\u00a0 I have a group of eight men, ages 30-45.\u00a0 They all have degrees in engineering or chemstry.\u00a0 None of them are from Beijing so they are all going to school away from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amber.schlomer.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amber.schlomer.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amber.schlomer.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amber.schlomer.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amber.schlomer.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/amber.schlomer.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150,"href":"https:\/\/amber.schlomer.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions\/150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amber.schlomer.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amber.schlomer.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amber.schlomer.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}