This here is a little bit of an amalgam of thoughts and stories and bits and pieces of things that I originally wrote out while my reading class was taking a test. For reasons I won't go into, the notebook I wrote it in is now in someone else's room and though I have every intention of retrieving it soon, I would like to update before doing so.
First, I would like to tell everyone that we had a real Thanksgiving in Kaifeng China. Ben ordered a turkey off of taobao (a cross between amazon and e-bay), but otherwise most of the ingredients we collected here. We had mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, steamed broccoli, carrot pennies, stuffing, gravy, bread, and baked apples. We invited one of the Australian teachers, the German teacher, and the Japanese teacher and his wife as well as several Chinese students and one of the translators who works for the international affairs office. It was quite delicious.
In other news, it is that wonderful time of the year when professors start working on finals and students start studying for them. We have about three weeks or so till the end of the semester. Conversation finals start early so that everyone will have enough time to have oral conversations. Ben and I have worked together to design our final and it looks pretty, I think.
My confidence about my Chinese oscillates between being very proud to slightly embarrassed. However, I am certain that my ability has definitely been improving steadily. Occasionally I wonder if I studied the wrong language in college, or in high school, but it is too late. And in all honesty, with the workout Japanese grammar gives your brain, I feel like there's not much grammatically that can intimidate me. (The exception is Russian. Scares the Dejesus out me. Strangely, I still insist to myself that French would be impossible to learn. Guess I'm going to draw the line somewhere. Spanish however would be fun to go back and work on....) That was a bit of a tangent. But back to Chinese! I am studying for about two hours a week with a student of mine, and that keeps me somewhat honest even during these intensive weeks when I spend a good deal of time reading and writing things or otherwise working. The more time I spend working, the more time I spend using English. And when I'm exhausted from said work, I relax by reading or watching things in English. It is a vicious cycle. But, my TV works fine and I have watched Chinese TV if not regularly then enough that I can talk to people about 那是我妈码 (That's my mom!), a reality show where young men go on and answer questions about their mothers' preferences and traits. And Mona, or 豪杰(Haojie) keeps me honest by giving me and quizzing me on vocabulary and grammar.
I have been eating lunch with my students more regularly, and I am quite enjoying it. I feel in need of a break from teaching, but the actual classes are going well. My conversation class, which at the beginning of the semester I had no clue how to run much less make active and fun, have gone quite well the last few weeks. I am proud of where I am now, though I somewhat wish I could go back and start the class from the beginning without the bumbling and missteps I made the first month or so of the semester. But that was the price of growth. I know I am going to be teaching the same students next semester, though it is currently up in the air as to what I will be teaching them.
It is cold out, though not enough for snow. We had a flurry about a week ago, but no more.
This was surprisingly organized. I did not expect it to be so.
Oh, one final note: I have been talking to my Reading classes about Native Speakers and bad grammar. What it means about a person or character if they make certain grammar mistakes. You can call this a conversation about dialects, or classes. The thing I want them to remember is simply one's education level. If someone has poor grammar and speaking skills it is assumed that they are not educated. So, on their test I had a set of 10 sentences, which they had to mark as being said by someone well or poorly educated. All the sentences were taken from Pirates of the Caribbean. I'm quite pleased by how it turned out.
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