This was one of my favorite
days! We have been in the "third
week hump"...some people are sick, some are tired, some are sick of their
roommates, and some are super stressed about their lesson plans (I would say I
am not quite any of those...although I am probably more tired than I realize)...but
today people finally calmed down a lot and morale did a 180*...today was a
lot of fun!! And we are all getting
pretty excited about heading to Taipei in the morning!
Today we left Suzhou at 7:15 and hit
the road for a university on the outskirts of Shanghai and met up with a group
of 15 teachers, also sponsored by the China Institute who are "future
teachers of Mandarin" - they are taking classes on Mandarin and how to
teach it. They were SUPER excited to see us - they have evidently been in
class 7 hours a day (with three hours of character practice) and a great deal
of evening homework, so most nights they don’t have time for anything
else. They have been going for three weeks and have three more weeks
coming up - they are all US citizens but were almost all originally born in
China or Taiwan...
They had us break into groups with
them and have the "Teach China" teachers (that's me) share with the
Future Mandarin teachers...and as we shared our lesson plan ideas they really
had A LOT of interesting stories and factoids and insights for us and were
really excited that we actually knew what we were talking about too!
:) So we did that for a while, ate lunch on campus at a restaurant, and
then went to the Urban Planning Museum. We were each paired with another
Future Mandarin Teacher...mine was named Li Li and our assignment was to spend
an hour and a half looking through the museum and creating a lesson that could
be used in a Mandarin class and in one of our classes, write our description on
the sheet they gave us, and turn it into our program directors at the end of
the 1.5 hour time.
The museum was pretty cool - very
new and futuristic and we had a great time looking through - Li Li is from Sichuan
province (where the pandas are) and has never been to Shanghai and hasn't
really had time to explore yet, so I was able to teach her a good bit about the
Bund from what we had learned a few days ago - she also would see something and
plunge into a story about her childhood...so it was really cool! She told
me some stories about things that I will really just have to tell you when I
get back in the states -my email won't go through if I type about it right
now.
Overall we had a great time - their
enthusiasm was infectious and really picked all of us up. After that we
had time to walk and shop along Nanjing street and then we did a dinner cruise
together along the Bund at night, all lit up and glistening - it was gorgeous -
and the skies were clear. So far every day I have been in Shanghai I have
seen blue sky...I don't know if it is a fluke, or if they just have a more
progressive pollution control system...but it has been really nice.
Please click on the image below to view the whole album:
 |
| July 22, 2011 - Shanghai - A day with our future Mandarin Teachers! |
And now we are off for Taiwan! We have been telling ourselves the sky is
going to turn blue and birds are going to sing and internet will be readily
accessible in Taipei... :) we will see, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment