Saying Goodbye

Today was my last full day in China! I thought I would take it easy and have a restful day before traveling... but it was not to be. First I was running around all morning trying to input grades and turn in paperwork (I'm still not done). Then I went downtown with some students to eat hotpot... after which we spent 4 hours shopping. Whoops. I made it back just in time to get paid and then go to the market with other students to get ingredients for dinner.

My student, Lancer, cooked a giant feast for us!

And then afterwards, as we were all saying goodbye, we were all standing around and the students started looking a little emotional, so Betsy said, "It looks like we're about to do trust falls."

So of course, we did.

And then finally I went around and hugged everyone, and they left, making room for Adam and Laurie to come in and say goodbye! WHEW! What a crazy day, but no better way to end my stay in China :)

My Greatest Achievement

Goodness gracious! This week has just been full of craziness and fun! I just got back from my freshmen girls' dorm where we had a SPONTANEOUS DANCE PARTY.

You may not realize how big of a deal this is. Maybe I should refer you to this post about my earlier experience in freshmen girls dancing.

Uh huh. Remember that?

Now compare that to this:

Wow! It looks like they actually feel comfortable dancing!

What happened was some of my students complained that they feel like they don't have enough social activities at their school. I explained to them that the only reason why American students have so many social activities is because the students are the ones to initiate, plan, and host all these fun things. In contrast, Chinese students always wait for their teachers to allow them to have a party for a school event. I told them that if they want more social activities, they should just have some parties in their dorms.

So they did!

They invited me to their dorm, and at first we just sat around playing cards, but eventually everyone got pretty tired of sitting down. We all got up to stretch, someone put on music, and the next thing you know, I was jumping around and saying, "THIS IS DANCING! JUST DO IT!" That resulted in this:

Soon they were going crazy. They started calling all their friends to come. Whoever passed by their dorm they would seriously ambush and drag them into our party! Haha! It was crazy!

We probably danced for a good 2 hours. I'm super glad they had fun and actually were active for once! Yay! What an awesome time!

In the end, as the school year draws to a close, I consider getting my students to actually have spontaneous, active fun as my greatest achievement in my year teaching here.

Prom in Guiyang!

Tonight our university had its first prom ever for the English department juniors!

Actually, this was quite a hassle to get approved. The person in charge of all extra curricular activities  is the communist party secretary for our department, and she does NOT like the students to really have any fun, especially not western-themed fun. Thankfully, the dean of the English department is super supportive of extra-curricular events, and she was able to approve the prom by saying that it is an academic event. The only downside is that we have to have it in the classroom on a weekday, but whatever!

Students decorating the classroom.

Not gonna lie, for the first like two hours, it was pretty awkward. No one would dance. They all just kinda stood around the perimeter of the room eating snacks. It was worse than junior high.

Girls politely standing against the wall.

Look at all these crazy snacks behind me!

But finally after they realized that if they weren't going to dance, it was going to be very boring, they all got out on the dance floor and just went crazy. And I think they had a lot of fun!

The students elected a popular boyfriend/girlfriend couple as their prom king and queen! I made them dance to All My Life.

The king and queen!

ALLLL MYYYYY LIIIIIIIIFE

I PRAYED FOR SOMEONE LIKE YOUUUU

And that was it! What a great night!

ESL Conversation Starters

One thing that has been really helpful for me as a teacher in China has been sharing ideas and lesson plans with other teachers. I don't know if I will continue to be a teacher for the long term, but I figured that whatever experience I did gain in this one year could still be helpful for others! I've decided that whenever I come across an idea that really works well with my students, I'll share it on here!

For starters, our school's English corner last Monday went really well. Every week Betsy meets with the student leaders to help them come up with discussion questions. This week the students wanted the topic to be "Your Life Story." Of course, many students who come to English corner are from other departments at the university, and their English is usually not so great, so we needed something to help them get started talking.

I suggested doing a happiness line graph. This idea was actually based on a reflective activity that we did at a couple ICF leadership meetings (many of my ideas actually are derived from InterVarsity leadership experience... go figure). The x-axis of the graph is time in years starting from when you were born until the present. The y-axis is a scale of how happy you were. So if you were really happy at a certain point in your life, you should draw your line going higher at that point on the graph. It makes more sense if you look at the picture.

The x-axis units say "born, elementary school, middle school, high school, university, now."
I guess I've been steadily getting happier!

This worked surprisingly well! I thought maybe the idea would confuse students, but in the end, having a visual really helped them to talk about their experiences growing up, both the good and the bad. It was a great time of conversation!

This idea can also be used for any conversation group; not just English learners!

Hope this is helpful! Have fun conversing! :)