Summer Project

Right when we got to Chengdu, a 3rd year PCer asked me and three other PC 13s to do a presentation at his university. Every summer for 2 weeks PCers do a summer project, which is usually working at a university outside of your site teaching English to middle school teachers. We as 13s don't do one until next year, but because the four of us have middle school experience, they wanted to use us this year.

Mianyang Normal University is about 90 minutes north of Chengdu located on top of a mountain. The campus is small - only 1,500 students go there. Normal means that it is a teacher's college. In front of 150 middle school teachers the four of us talked about US Education (funding, history of, etc.), American educational culture and Language Arts teaching techniques.

We were picked up and first taken to a People's Park that had an amusement park, tea houses and mahjong tables everywhere. Then the four of us were treated to a very lavish buffet at a $1,000/night hotel with the president's wife and the waiban (foreign assistance officer). Ice cream, french fries, steak, all the western food that you forget about when you are loving Sichuan cuisine.

Our 2 1/2 hour presentation was in a large lecture hall with huge fans competing with our voices. The microphones were sketchy. The teachers wanted us to speak slower and louder. By the end of the presentation, we were all dripping with sweat. We had a Q & A session afterwards. They asked about teachers in the United States and were they respected, what was teaching at a high school like and to explain about extra-curricular activities. Chinese education takes the educational philosophy of "sage of the stage" - teachers are in charge of the students' education and the students are tabula rasa. We talked about the current American educational philosophy of "guide on the side" - teachers are merely advisors and students are in charge of their own education.

Afterwards, the waiban gave each of us a gift of a Chinese opera mask. We all agreed that we could totally do the lecture tour - fancy dinner, great audience, swag afterwards.

It was pretty incredible. It got me extremely excited about teaching. We start model school Monday. This is the 2nd year PC has implemented this program. Team teaching oral English to a class of voluntary students. I got a great guy who has taught before, but is really eager to work together. For the next three weeks we will be teaching for 1 1/2 hours to 15-20 middle school students, 1 1/2 prep time and 1 hour of reflection and evaluation. Then 2 hours of language. I was first hesitant to reduce my language class hours from 5 a day to only 2 ( I love my teacher Liu Laoshi), but getting into our classroom and our class list and realizing that this is a time to experiment and to hone our TEFL skills really revs me up.

Most of our students will have English names that they have chosen, but some won't. Based on the students' choice they can either chose one for themselves or the teachers can name them. I started to think I could use some of my students' names from Denver. That thought brought me down to the missing - how much I miss them, miss teaching them, being in their lives. I got out my pictures of my classroom and my AVID kids. My heart tightened. I have the best students EVER!!!


Honestly.....