On wednesday we found out our site placements!!
I will spend the next two years teaching at the Lanzhou University of Technology in a slightly secluded area of Lanzhou (capital of Gansu), about a half hour out from city center. The student body is a little over 18,000 kids, on two campuses (I'll be teaching at both). I'll be living on the main campus, in the teachers neighborhood. I've heard from some of the China 11s that my apartment is really great, but I don't know much about it yet. The two campuses are supposedly only about 15 min apart (though I'm skeptical about this, have heard that it may be much farther), and also there is supposedly a shuttle bus that the school runs to ferry between the two campuses. Lanzhou is about a 22hour train ride from Chengdu, where PC HQ is.
It looks like I'll be teaching some upper-level classes, including comparative literature, intro. to english speaking countries, european culture/history, etc., as well as the standard oral english classes. I might even teach some oral english to post-grad students! I'll see how that pans out once I get to site and can negotiate with my Dean. I'll be teaching in the Foreign Languages school, as a member of the English department.
There are actually about 12 peace corps volunteers total who are scattered through Lanzhou, and a couple more just a few hours outside of the city, so we have a really awesome support system ready-made. I leave tomorrow (saturday) to visit my site for about a week, so I'll know lots more when I get back...
Outside of that, it's been a pretty haphazard week. On monday we were given a mid-PST evaluation based on what all of our traineers had to say about us... I think most everyone was very pleased. With model school over, our afternoons have been filled with tech sessions and with visits from China 11s who have been cycling through Chengdu. Wednesday was pretty exciting because they brought us all back together to make site announcements -- I hadn't seen people from the other training sites since that first week! Evenings have been sweaty but fun: badmitten, pingpong, cards, and beer fill up most evenings.
I will spend the next two years teaching at the Lanzhou University of Technology in a slightly secluded area of Lanzhou (capital of Gansu), about a half hour out from city center. The student body is a little over 18,000 kids, on two campuses (I'll be teaching at both). I'll be living on the main campus, in the teachers neighborhood. I've heard from some of the China 11s that my apartment is really great, but I don't know much about it yet. The two campuses are supposedly only about 15 min apart (though I'm skeptical about this, have heard that it may be much farther), and also there is supposedly a shuttle bus that the school runs to ferry between the two campuses. Lanzhou is about a 22hour train ride from Chengdu, where PC HQ is.
It looks like I'll be teaching some upper-level classes, including comparative literature, intro. to english speaking countries, european culture/history, etc., as well as the standard oral english classes. I might even teach some oral english to post-grad students! I'll see how that pans out once I get to site and can negotiate with my Dean. I'll be teaching in the Foreign Languages school, as a member of the English department.
There are actually about 12 peace corps volunteers total who are scattered through Lanzhou, and a couple more just a few hours outside of the city, so we have a really awesome support system ready-made. I leave tomorrow (saturday) to visit my site for about a week, so I'll know lots more when I get back...
Outside of that, it's been a pretty haphazard week. On monday we were given a mid-PST evaluation based on what all of our traineers had to say about us... I think most everyone was very pleased. With model school over, our afternoons have been filled with tech sessions and with visits from China 11s who have been cycling through Chengdu. Wednesday was pretty exciting because they brought us all back together to make site announcements -- I hadn't seen people from the other training sites since that first week! Evenings have been sweaty but fun: badmitten, pingpong, cards, and beer fill up most evenings.
posted by Kristen at
Friday, August 11, 2006
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