This time it is the real blogger

Hi guys, lunchtime again after a morning of class. Shelley beat me to the punch and told about our weekend. I just want to add that the Three Gorges is a fantastic place. I guess that if you are an Engineer you would be even more impressed and interested in the detail. However, as a lay person, it is enough just to be there in the middle of that man-made wonder, even for just ten minutes. It was worth the very long bus ride. We had a second advantage. I was not totally surprised to see how modern Shanghai and Beijing are. Wuhan is quite modern too but with 8 million people, it was not unexpected to find it a modern thriving city as well. But I had expected to see small villages to be more like the pictures we have all seen of old China. There are two things wrong with that. One, there are no SMALL villages here, or so it seems, and two, the small cities we have seen all seem to be growing fast and doing well. When we traveled bak to the hotel, we passed by hundreds of farms and saw farmers wearing the traditional farmer's hat and squatting among their crops. Except, they all had modern machinery in their hands!

I am sure, and I have been told, that there are many very small villages that are very poor and have not changed from many, many years ago. But these are not the places that a tourist or a foreigner sees so I cannot claim to have seen them.

Today's class was OK. I am trying to stress that the students practice speaking, form words clearly with mouth movement, look at the listener and, what seem impossible for many, speak loudly. I know that I have some hearing problem but some never raise their voices over the whisper level. All the teachers have said the same, especially about the women. Chinese speech is quite different from American speech. Theirs is tonal and never, or at least as far as I can tell, end with a consonent so I have to insist on a final t or d or b or etc.

In the last three days of real teaching I am going to continue as I have done. some teachers have been playing games and giving the class exercises to do at their dorms and both the students and the teachers seem quite happy with that. However, as I have previously said, the students all can read and research quite well. It seems that our role as teachers of this English Sumer Camp is to have the students hear English and speak English. I am not sure that reading English or playing games serves that purpose. In addition, my teaching partner who has my AM class in the PM and vice versa, does seem do to many of thse fun things and we must complement each other quite well.

My partner, Julieanne, and I have agreed to evaluate the students together. We will make observations nd comments and give a grade. But the grade goes nowhere. I have told the students that I will mark them on participation and cannot give a grade based upon English skill. they all come from different backgrounds and it would not be fair to measure them one agains the other. But since we have been told that the grade we give does not go into any school record, Julieanne and I will try to make meaningful comments.

Shelley seems to have more time to fill in on the fter school activities and I will leave her those honors.

Stay well and have fun. We leave China on Saturday but spend a week in Berkeley with our son, Jeff, to rest up a week before we get home to Jacksonville.