all students, all the time
Tuesday afternoon I have office hours after class, and finally students have started taking advantage of them! This week a few of my seniors came in wanting to work on their pronunciation. I'm no expert in how to do this, but with a little trial and error I think we hit upon some strategies and tips that they will find useful.
That evening I headed over to the west campus to judge the finals of a speaking contest that the English Association was holding for freshman engineering students. The topic was Freshmen and Dreams, and the 14 final contestants not only delivered speeches on their aims in life, but also answered questions posed by the judges (a little advance warning/prep time for this category would have been nice), gave performances in which the Backstreet Boys and Weslife made big appearances, and played a taboo-like word-guessing game. The students did a great job and I had a lot of fun! Afterwards the audience had a few questions for Pierce and me. My favorites were: What do girls in America look for in a boy? ["good question! american boys want to know the same thing!"], and Should we call you Ms. Kristen or Mrs. Pierce? aka how you know you spend too much time with your sitemate.
Wednesday evening one of my sophomores came by from 7:20 to about 10 o'clock, with a whole list of prepared questions for conversation, ranging from culture to politics to college experience. I was exhausted by the time she headed out, but really proud of the initiative she's taking on practicing English as well as the awesome questions she came up with.
Tomorrow night is English Corner as usual... I don't know if I've mentioned much about how English Corner works. Just envision walking into a room and having 250 hungry pairs of eyes turn on you and cheering break out. Every friday. First you talk for a while to everyone, then they vigorously plead for you to sing to them, and finally you find yourself seated in a chair with about 100 chinese students standing full-circle around you hanging on your every word and edging closer and closer as you speak. When it's over, they all want your number and to take pictures with you and as exhausting as it all is, they're thirsting for the contact and the practice and it's really sort of incredible that they are there each week whether the foreign teachers make it or not. I'll take pictures on friday.
Last bit of babble about my students: the seniors have been debating all week and I wanted to share a few of the funnier outbursts which were sprinkled into their generally quite well-constructed arguments ---->
"If you have no idea then just shut up!"
"I think your question is out of the debate! I think YOURS is!"
"I think your question is... absurd? Yes, absurd!"
"Are you even a human being in this society?!"
"You say homosexuality is not natural. But what about the flowers? And the earthworms?!"
I love my job.
That evening I headed over to the west campus to judge the finals of a speaking contest that the English Association was holding for freshman engineering students. The topic was Freshmen and Dreams, and the 14 final contestants not only delivered speeches on their aims in life, but also answered questions posed by the judges (a little advance warning/prep time for this category would have been nice), gave performances in which the Backstreet Boys and Weslife made big appearances, and played a taboo-like word-guessing game. The students did a great job and I had a lot of fun! Afterwards the audience had a few questions for Pierce and me. My favorites were: What do girls in America look for in a boy? ["good question! american boys want to know the same thing!"], and Should we call you Ms. Kristen or Mrs. Pierce? aka how you know you spend too much time with your sitemate.
Wednesday evening one of my sophomores came by from 7:20 to about 10 o'clock, with a whole list of prepared questions for conversation, ranging from culture to politics to college experience. I was exhausted by the time she headed out, but really proud of the initiative she's taking on practicing English as well as the awesome questions she came up with.
Tomorrow night is English Corner as usual... I don't know if I've mentioned much about how English Corner works. Just envision walking into a room and having 250 hungry pairs of eyes turn on you and cheering break out. Every friday. First you talk for a while to everyone, then they vigorously plead for you to sing to them, and finally you find yourself seated in a chair with about 100 chinese students standing full-circle around you hanging on your every word and edging closer and closer as you speak. When it's over, they all want your number and to take pictures with you and as exhausting as it all is, they're thirsting for the contact and the practice and it's really sort of incredible that they are there each week whether the foreign teachers make it or not. I'll take pictures on friday.
Last bit of babble about my students: the seniors have been debating all week and I wanted to share a few of the funnier outbursts which were sprinkled into their generally quite well-constructed arguments ---->
"If you have no idea then just shut up!"
"I think your question is out of the debate! I think YOURS is!"
"I think your question is... absurd? Yes, absurd!"
"Are you even a human being in this society?!"
"You say homosexuality is not natural. But what about the flowers? And the earthworms?!"
I love my job.
posted by Kristen at
Thursday, October 19, 2006
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