Day 4: Training begins!

Today marked the official beginning of ETA training, aka the first day of real work, but it was still a lot of fun. After a quick icebreaker and meeting some more of the ELC staff (Janice, Theresa, and Alice), we began with “Survival Cantonese,” taught by one of the GAs, Azita. We weren’t sure what to expect, since we were all at different levels of comprehension, but it turned out to be an educational experience for all of us, learning phrases from the basic numbers and “Good morning” to various expletives so we know when people are cranky.

After that was a meeting with Eve on basic rules and regulations (including what to do in case of a typhoon, since it’s still the rainy season), then it was off to Taipa Village for a delicious lunch at a local Thai restaurant. Although I’d had Thai food many times in New Haven, it was fun to try some new dishes, like green curry with shrimp (spicy!) and coconut milk soup with chicken and Napa cabbage (creamy and savory). The restaurant owner also had a great sense of humor, pretending to toss a giant tub of raw shrimp (complete with heads) on our table =P

The afternoon began with an interesting discussion on what it was like to teach students in Macau, with input from Eve, Erica and two UM students who work in the ELC, Joseph and Carol. As Susan, Amy, and I have realized over the past few days, Macau has a lot of systemic quirks from being a former Portuguese colony, so it’s not always directly comparable to mainland China or Hong Kong. It was helpful to find out things like how most Macanese students have at least one part-time job but also spend a lot of time in class (each class is usually 90 minutes), so they don’t have a lot of free time for outside activities.

Next was a discussion about lesson-planning, starting with an exercise on how to make a PB&J sandwich. Austin volunteered to be the “teacher” for this demonstration, which resulted in a lot of hilarity as the rest of us pretended to have no understanding of what was supposed to happen.

Austin teaching us about PB&J

Amy and Emily being good students

We ended with another hour of survival Cantonese, then split up to do our own things in the evening. Susan and I embarked on a quest to find a good Chinese-English dictionary, starting with an impromptu tour of the UM walkways as we tried to find the campus bookstore. It turned out to be disappointingly small, with only a few dictionary options, and only a few Chinese – English textbooks for what we think is the beginner-level class for foreigners.

Following some phoned-in directions from Eve, we caught the 25 back to Macau and found a fairly large bookstore a few stops away from our apartment, with a decent collection of dictionaries and Chinese learning books. After much debate, I ended up buying two dictionaries (Chinese-English and English-Chinese), while Susan picked up a textbook and a translated version of an American young adult fantasy novel, which she is planning to work through slowly to improve her reading skills.

Home now...time to get dinner and plan my mock lesson to teach the other ETAs!