ugghh, first day of teaching over. I'm teaching one group of students, 22 of them officially but I have a couple of extra people who want to come to classes, too, though they won't be taking the exams and won't get any credits for the class. The students are all doing their PhDs and are from 25 to 38 years old. It's a good group of people, their English is quite good and there are a few students who are really active, and somehow I managed to force all of them to talk today. Even if there is one man who really finds it difficult and when i ask him something he'll just look around unconfortably and say "next". But hey, that's English, right...

What I do find REALLY difficult though is that I'm only teaching this one group, 16 hours every week. Yikes! The other two foreign teachers here teach four groups each, which means they only have to plan a few lessons per week, while I'll have to somehow come up with 16 hrs worth of meaningful things to do every week. This really freaks me out, as I already had enough work trying to think of ways to keep the students active for 4 hours today. Any ideas???

What's more, many of my students have jobs, families, and other classes, and I'd hate to waste so much of their time every week if the classes aren't meaningful for them. Personally, I think that 16 hours of conversational English is waaaay too much anyway, and that they could use the time better doing other stuff, if even just for half of it. But the decision, of course, isn't mine, so all I can do is try to keep racking my brain to fill the classes.

On a more positive note, the students seem like a good bunch, willing to learn and as friendly as any smiling Chinese. Interestingly enough, when I asked them to write down a few things they would like me to include in the future classes, most of them mentioned that they would like to learn about the Finnish culture, education system, history and so on. And here's one for the ICC students: one of them especially wanted me to deal with "taboos in communication with foreigners". Any good ideas how I might do this as a useful activity? Steve?

In the beginning, I let the students pick 'English names' for themselves, as this seems to be the way things are done here. I had printed out a list of the 100 most popular names for both men & women in the US, and let them choose what they wanted. Still, I ended up having a girl called Martin (I tried to suggest that maybe she should spell it 'Marty', but she insisted on the '-in', so I let her have her way) and another girl called Windy (which I wrote down as Wendy, but later noticed that was actually spelled with an 'I'). Another girl showed up for the afternoon class, who sat herself next to Windy and insisted that her English name is Wendy. So there we go.

My whole day was basically spent thinking of what on earth to do in class, and then doing it, and now i should do the same for tomorrow (another 4 hours!!)... I gave the students a text on the Chinese space mission to read, and will now try to think of how we can build a conversation on that.

In between my classes I was hanging out on campus waiting for the photocopy people to show up so I could photocopy that article, and there I met a student, Alan (this of course being his 'English name'), who is an English major. After my classes, Alan took me for a tour of the campus and a dinner at the student cafeteria, which is a big 3-storey building in the middle of the main campus. There with a dinner card, which works like a credit card that you stick into one of the machines they have at the stalls, you can get all sorts of chinese dishes for just a couple of yuan. Will have to get one of those cards soon!

Speaking of dinners, last night's one was pretty good, it was my official welsome dinner with the members of the Department of International Cooperation, which has 5 employees, including Feng Ying, all the other 4 are men. The dinner was of course begun with some Chinese 'wine', which was 38% alcohol. We had to first toast together for three rounds ('bottom up', was what they kept saying...hehe) and then came endless toasts in pairs and threes and whatnot. Feng Ying only ever had a sip of her drink, but the men were quite impressed by my ability to down the shots but still not start giggling out of control. Needless to say, that's exactly what they were doing after the first ten minutes. I had fun watching them get drunk and point at each other and shout "OHHH, Mr. Ma is SOO drunk!!" etc. In the end I offered to walk them home, but they assured that they'd make it themselves. All in all quite entertaining :)

But now I need to think of something for tomorrow's class....*yaawwnn*