N: Blogs & the Quake

We get a weekly email from something called ZGBriefs regarding happenings in China.  One of my favorite sections contains links to other articles (some are Chinese, most are English). This last week a section was devoted to blog posts about the earthquake that happened a couple weeks ago.  I thought you might be interested in reading some of them:

Reporter's Night on Park Bench

Kids After the Quake

Covering the Earthquake Zone: A Diary

A day in quake-hit Beichuan

A friend of ours passed along a picture of his school sports arena.  We haven't seen it for ourselves here at our school, but this is the image of universities hundreds of miles away from the epicenter of the quake.  Students get nervous feeling any sort of movement (a truck rumbling by could shake the building) and end of fleeing the building.  You have to sleep somewhere I suppose.

K: Lonestar Pie goes to Beijing

This past weekend we made a quick trip to Beijing for my halfway prenatal appointment at the International Hospital there. I have visited the hospital here in Yinchuan once this semester just to make sure that everything was going well and though we're considered remote China and going to the hospital is a little bit like being on a scavenger hunt (pay this money here and take this ticket there where they will take your blood and give it back to you. Then take your blood around the corner and come back here with the results...), I was actually pretty impressed with the care. But it's absolutely impossible to get anyone to tell the gender of the baby out here even with a foreign passport. (It's illegal for Chinese in China to know the sex of a baby before it's born because of the national gender imbalance. The country doesn't want parents to decide that if they can only have one baby, then they will abort if it's not the desired sex.)

We get enough ambiguity in our lives, so we decided that we would like to know what sort of baby to expect. Hence, the trip to BJ. We had an appointment on Friday and found out that Lonestar Pie is healthy and... shy. When the doc moved to find the gender, all we saw were the bottoms of two tiny little crossed feet. Bummer.

We spent the rest of the weekend eating western food, hanging out with good friends who work in BJ, shopping at IKEA for LP's nursery, and relaxing at the Mac (our organization's headquarters). We had a great weekend, but were still pretty bummed that we didn't get to find out LP's gender. So on Monday morning, N turned on the charm and called the hospital asking if there was anything we could do to get that information (for free). We were quite surprised to be told to come on back in at our convenience, so we hopped on a bus for the 1.5 hour ride across town to the hospital... Beijing is on the big side for a city. =) We might have been at the hospital for all of five minutes. We got to the office where they took us right in. I hopped up on the table and the doc had barely started the ultrasound when he announced, "It's a boy." Huh? He froze the screen and swiveled it around and sure enough, you didn't have to be a doctor to know what you were looking at. Lonestar Pie is a boy!

Immediately after we left the doc's office, we were sending out text messages to announce the news when I started to feel really dizzy. N said he felt it too and then a minute later, it stopped. We didn't know it, but we were just in our first earthquake. Beijing is in northeast(ish) China and the epicenter of that quake was in Sichuan in western(ish) China. 1300 miles away. Imagine how big that quake must have been for us to feel it all the way in BJ. Yinchuan is closer to Sichuan so our teammates and students and friends were shaken even worse than we were, but thankfully nothing was damaged and no one was injured where we live. Remember the folks in Sichuan these days as they're dealing with the aftermath of great devastation.

N: Midterm Exams

As some of our friends who work at universities in the states are preparing for graduation, we here in China just gave midterm exams.  As foreign English teachers in the Chinese education system, we have a slightly difficult time with the reputation that has preceded us.  Stereotypes of a foreign English teacher usually include student thought such as:

“The teacher always plays games.”
“The teacher likes to make exams easy.”
“All we do in class is talk and have discussions.  We don’t do anything.”

The last one I think is quite interesting considering we are, in most situations, asked to teach oral English.  The students might be missing something in that case. 

There is truth to some of those things that are said by native students and teachers alike. We are fighting the idea that foreign English teachers don’t prepare lessons, that we are unprofessional, and that we don’t care about grammar.  Games can be educational, but perhaps the purpose of the game, the lesson learned, and the skills practiced should be expressed explicitly.  The completion of our Masters’ degrees will help a little in their view of our commitment.

I’m sorry.  This is not some diatribe meant to make you think sad thoughts about our teaching situation.  We love working here.  We love being challenging teachers and destroying those stereotypes.  In fact, K and I just wrote a killer exam for our sophomore extensive reading class for English majors.  KILLER.  We did not intend for the exam to be difficult.  We intended for the exam to be challenging and not easy.  I think we succeeded.  We have been practicing skills in class and every section of the exam was in a format that was very familiar to them.  We told them that a portion of the vocabulary that we had been studying would be on the test. They were set up for success.  I think we only had 3 As in our 150 students.  Don’t think that that is a bad thing.  A “C” is truly average in China.  So based on that, an “A” is something that is amazing and extraordinary.

Do you want to see what sort of exam is challenging for our sophomore reading students? Here is your chance native English speakers!  I have attached the exam to this post.  Feel free to take the exam on your computer.  You can print it out if you like, but know that it is 10 pages.  If anybody ends up taking the exam, I’ll send you the answers.

Download extensive_reading_midterm_a.pdf

Happy testing.