Shaking the rust off my Chinese

決 心∶每 天 最 少 寫 一 句 中 文。

Resolution: To write at least one sentence of Chinese every day.

There are several reasons behind this idea. First, even though I will be taking a Chinese class at UM, it may be one that focuses on speaking rather than reading or writing, which is what I need more help with anyway. There are a lot of things I know how to say already, but I don’t always recognize the characters when I see them or know how to write them. Actually, the above sentence wasn’t too bad – the only phrase I had to look up was “resolution” since I didn’t even know how to say that.

Second, the classes only meet twice a week, so unless I force myself to work on something every day, I won’t be getting daily practice (as I would have at Yale, if I’d had the time to take Chinese). Third, I hope that forcing myself to write will teach me new vocabulary (via my English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries, plus maybe some help from Google Translator), which will make reading easier because writing is production while reading is simply recognition. I’ll probably write down the characters in my paper journal first, just because that’s the best way for me to learn, but now that I’ve installed Chinese fonts, I should practice typing those too.

The dictionaries I'm using =P

This week has been pretty tiring, but with lots of little accomplishments. I apologize in advance for the lack of photos, but there hasn't been much to photograph this week. We finally found out our class assignments: each of us will be teaching two sections of EELC101: Interaction and Study Skills 1, so working with about 40 “low-intermediate” level students total. Monday we met with all the other EELC101 teachers (there are 24 sections!) to discuss the textbooks, class policies, test-writing, etc. The textbooks are brand-new this year (and haven’t even arrived yet), so no one really knows quite how things are going to work, but the topics (ranging from advertising in the media to portrayals of girls in fairy tales) seem fairly interesting.

Tuesday morning was simply tedious – I had to proctor my fourth placement exam, including a writing portion, so that was about four hours of distributing stuff, pacing back and forth, then collecting and counting stuff *sigh* Sam had it even worse – she had to proctor the evening makeup exam for local students, so she was there from 7-10 PM! On the bright side, she got a ride home from Eric (the ELC resident techie) on his motorcycle, which must have been pretty cool =P In the afternoons, we met with our mentor teachers, Janice and Theresa, to go over our plans for the first lesson, after which we all felt much better about what we were going to do.

Wednesday was another day of meetings - first, some "new staff" stuff with Kim, then we joined the general faculty meeting. Some of it was rather painful, mainly because it went on for so long (2.5 hours!) and lots of items on the agenda didn't apply to us ETAs, but some of it was very useful, like discussing various methods of encouraging class participation. After a delicious catered lunch (udon noodles, spring rolls, saffron rice with chicken/ham/raisins, shepherd's pie, many types of salad, and various cut fruits), the four of us set out to (finally) open our BNU bank accounts so we can get our first stipend checks in a couple weeks. That process went on much longer than expected because there was a mix-up about the required paperwork, but it finally went through.

While we were waiting for processing, Susan and I went to check out a local stationary store, hoping to find planners so we could keep better track of our daily schedules. Eve recommended one across the street from the UM annex, which we found to be a friendly, well-stocked, family-owned business (two brothers and a sister) called "Prince" (太 子) stationary store. We ended up talking with the oldest brother, Barry, for a long while after he realized we could speak/understand Mandarin, and at the end of the conversation he was even kind enough to point out two good coffee shops around the corner (never mind that neither Susan nor I are coffee-drinkers). Susan and I both got little calendars, and the sister who was working the register gave us a discount, so it was 29 MOP instead of 33 =)

Back to the ELC for a quick office orientation - Fanny showed us where all the supplies were kept (yay for free pens and paper!) as well as how to use the copy machine, which also has a nice scanning feature that can send the PDF files to an email address. Thursday was more of the same - a meeting with Eve in the morning to go over all the things we're expected to do (American corner activities, field trips, podcasts, etc.), then the afternoon was a computer orientation with Eric to go over the various facilities available (there's even a computer dedicated to film-editing!) and how to create our courses in UMMoodle (the equivalent of Blackboard, classesv2, etc.) Eric himself is a super nice guy - he gave Sam a ride home, as mentioned before, and he also asked us for help in selecting an English name for his daughter, who is due to be born sometime this month =)

Today we didn't officially have anything to do, but Susan and I went in to finish preparing for our first week of classes, finalizing class policies, printing out syllabi, etc. I felt very teacher-ish after making umpteen copies of various things to hand out on the first day, even more so after organizing my desk to have Post-it notes, paper clips, and various writing utensils handy at a moment's notice. (Btw, I need to find purple or green pens to use for correcting instead of red, because apparently the students have been traumatized by that color being used on all their papers since primary school.) To all the teachers I've ever had, now I know what you went through every year!

After some grocery shopping, cooking/eating dinner, and a brief visit from Emily/Amy, we're finally relaxing at home...time to break out the Scrabble!