Experiments in Orientation
Posterous is now blocked by the GFW. Posting stuff is easy, editing posts is an annoying ordeal. Them's the commie breaks, I guess.
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teaching
The Night Before Christmas - Mad Libs style
I created a mad libs version of the classic holiday story The Night Before Christmas to use with my classes. Today was the trial run because I only used it in one class, but that class contains some of the more rambunctious students so I had high expectations for them. They didn't let me down. Here are some excerpts (note that any names refer to students in class or foreign teachers):
When, what to my golden shower eyes should appear,
But a miniature tractor and 250 ridiculous hookers
With a little old driver, so sexy and XXX
I knew in a moment, it must be Phoenix....
I knew in a moment, it must be Phoenix....
...With the tractor full of hot pants and Phoenix too
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The crying and belching of each little fingernail.
As I drew in my ass and was turning around
Down the chimney Phoenix came with a bound.
He was dressed all in curses, from his toe to his tongue.
And his clothes were all abnormal with ashes and soot;
A bundle of teeth he had puked on his lap... <------- my favorite line
He had a stupid face and a little disgusting belly
That shook when he laughed like a bowlful of papaya
He was suicidal and tasty like a pregnant accountant. <----- also a fantastic line
But I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight
"Damn it!"
Filed under //
teaching
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Costumes
I'm pretty sure I was the only costumed teacher in all of Liaoning University. In one of my classes a couple students actually dressed up as well. A few more did themselves up during class.
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More Mummies
I don't work on Friday so we celebrated Halloween during my classes today. After talking about jack-o-lanterns, vampires, and trick or treating; and teaching them about werewolves and flaming bags of shit; I set up a mummy-off for a couple of classes. I divided the class into groups and had them race to create a mummy. The first group to cover their mummy with two roles of toilet paper was the winner. This task had little to do with learning English and a hell of a lot to do with my own entertainment.
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First Day of the Semester
Back to work after over a month of vacation. I only teach about 8 hours this week because the new students have some kind of orientation/military training or something for the first few weeks. I brought in the game Apples to Apples, I wasn't sure it was going to work but when I heard one of the students say "Fuzzy Adolf Hitler!" I knew it was the perfect game for my classes.
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Little Monsters
The main element of my kids class is fairy tales. Cynthia, the Chinese teacher that I work with, picked out a ton of well-known stories for the kids to read, learn, and recite. I've had to spend a lot of time reading and re-editing these stories, though, in order to remove useless, antiquated language and replace it with words the kids might actually need to use at some point. One thing that Cynthia was really keen on is having the students perform one of the fairy tales.
This Monday, the kids will perform Cinderella. I think the parents will come, but I'm really not sure about that. Each student has a part; Amy, the best student of the group, is the narrator with something like two pages of dialog to memorize; basically every other student has two or three lines. They're all small actors. Seriously, like 3 feet tall. On Thursday, we let them create masks to wear during their performance, I'm sure they needed a break from all that incredibly interesting and enlightening Cinderella/Goldilocks/Princess v. Pea talk we'd been having over the past few days. With the masks on, they all look like Michael Jackson's kids while I looked like an out of work, gay super hero. You might notice that some of the pictures overlap. That was intentional. I used the Diana and only wound the film 2/3 of the way I should have. The idea was to create one long, connected set of images. You can view the long version at China in 12 Frames.
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Little Kiddies in an Instant
My only work this summer, save two one-hour American Culture classes with some MBA students, is two weeks of kids classes. I just finished the first week and it went pretty well. I always get a little anxious about teaching children but it usually ends up being fun and way more entertaining than teaching college students. In my experience, kids always way more interested in learning than my college students. Most of them try to respond to every question I ask, regardless of if they're sure of the right answer or not. It helps that many of them have a good handle on English, about half of them have better listening and speaking skills than the MBA students who will go to America in less than a month. It also helps that kids love me. I've never treated children like children. I don't speak down to them or go apeshit when they get an answer right and clap and praise them like they're my dog who just brought me the shoe I was looking for. I talk to them like they're people. They also like to pet my hairy arms and beard, so I've got that going for me.
Most of our class is centered around fairy tales. We talk about a different tale each day; we'll read the story, go over vocabulary words, play games and sometimes I'll have them act out the parts. We've done the Princess and the Pea, Cinderella, and Goldilocks so far. Friday, we made western food including baked beans, garlic bread, deviled eggs, pizza, and chips and salsa. Actually, we only actually made the deviled eggs and garlic bread. The rest of it was just store bought or delivered.
A lot more preparation goes into kids classes though. With my college students, I can plan for a discussion or sometimes we'll go off on a tangent that will take up the entire class. With the kids classes, I usually have to plan every minute. This summer I lucked out because Cythina, the Chinese teacher that works with me during class and helps explain things, had the whole two weeks planned in advance with another foreign teacher. When that dude (read: douche bag) basically quit the night before classes were to start, I was called in to pinch-teach, so most of it was set up for me.
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"It's my special time of the month and I have such a high volume!" Student Presentation on Maxi Pads and Tampons
Today was the last of my finals so I'm done with work for the next week or two. As I previously explained, my students' final project was to pick a company to represent, then choose a couple new media/social network/blogging websites, and figure out how that company should utilized those sites to promote their products, connect with customers, etc. The sites they could choose from were Last.FM, Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, Delicious, and Posterous.
This group had one of the most entertaining presentations, partly because Richard (the guy in the video) is the only guy in the class of 22 students and the girls in his group choose to represent a company that makes feminine hygiene products. In this video, Richard shows the class how tampons and maxi pads work.
His point was that to do a demo like this over and over again in many different places would cost the company money, so why not just make a video of it and put it on Posterous? A good idea, indeed.
The other members of the group had some hilarious lines in the presentation: at one point someone said tampons were "for indoor use" and soon after I stopped taking video on my phone Sally (the girl in the video) said "It's my special time of the month and I have such a high volume!" Hilarious. This group will definitely get a good grade.
Sorry about the quality of the video, its from my phone, you get the idea though.
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