Pingxiang

In the words of 'Baby' from the film 'Dirty Dancing'- 'I carried a watermelon.' I actually did. Yesterday, we were given melons and mooncakes as a gift from the head of Foreign Teacher Affairs at the college (Bob) so I carried this melon up all the four floors to my apartment. These gifts were because it was the Mid-Autumn Day yesterday, where mooncakes (round cakes to resemble the moon, with either a sweet or savoury filling) are eaten and families often get together. The equivalent in England is probably the Harvest/Harvest Festival time, as the mid-autumn day is associated with the harvest here as well.

As I said at the beginning, I am now in Pingxiang, a medium sized city (about 1 point something million people live here I think) in the Jiangxi province, teaching college students aged between 18-22. My classes have between 35-43 pupils in them, and I'm teaching first year and second year students, who are either studying English or Business English as their major study.

So far, they've been going well, the larger of my classes tending to be the most challenging: trying to get everyone in the class to speak at least once and keeping things entertaining so those not speaking don't get bored! So I'm still learning how to get that balance but, a couple of my second year classes are very good and have a lot of students in them who are very eager to learn and improve their English. The trickiest thing so far has been knowing at what level to teach, ie how hard to make the lessons as in all of my second year classes, there are some students whose English is very good and they're confident when speaking, and then there are some students whose English isn't as good: they don't have the same amount of knowledge/vocabulary so they don't offer their answers as much. But, students do offer their feedback more here which is useful, as it helps me to go over my lesson plans and in effect help them.

I'm teaching two of my new first year classes tomorrow so hopefully that will go as well as the class I had on friday! I also got a card from one of my second year classes on friday, as on Saturday it was Teacher's Day, which was lovely and felt really nice to receive something from a class so soon! We went for dinner on friday with the languages department - v.nice and we didn't have to pay which was a bonus! Chinese hospitality at its best, and then some of us went to a KTV bar and sung the night away - again, something I v.much enjoyed as people back home can no doubt imagine!

The pic is an example of the kind of decor you get in chinese clubs (& yes, it is J9) q.cool I think! xxxxx