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Between class periods where I pretend to be a teacher, I occasionally go back to being a student. Success with Chinese, Chapter 12: Shopping at the Market. English definition: vegetables, greens Even from the very beginning of our trip in Beijing over a month ago, I’ve had a distinctly different experience as an expat than the other Americans in the CTLC program. Obviously the glaring difference was that among all of us, I’m the only one who shares the skin color of the native Chinese [...] The shop clerks at Walmart are starting to catch on to me. The guy who’s been trying to sell me an iron for the past week was among the six or seven people who mobbed me in the kitchenware section, and the mattress and bedding fuwuyuan totally called me out on having been there [...] After my Walmart escapade of the day, and even after the school workers who showed up unannounced at my door to install security bars on my windows (in the process worrying me immensely as I watched their crazy-dangerous methods of doing so on the 4th floor), a more-or-less impromptu CTLC group reunion was arranged for [...] At a sushi lunch today with Kami at the nearby Garden City megamall, I conversed with her of the difference in educational learning between knowledge acquisition and analytic work; of Kami’s thesis work on collapsing specialized knowledge towards an interdisciplinary base, and of our preferences between Murakami, Mishra, and Borges. Then I shopped around [...] My placement is at the 3rd Middle School of the Yucai School Group in Shenzhen’s Nanshan District! It’s one of the blue dots in the south portion of the map. View Shenzhen in a larger map The area it’s in, southern Nanshan district, is also known as Shekou. It’s mostly known as an expat community – so [...] I just went for a solitary jaunt through the surrounding Haidian district by myself, trying to reconnoiter the closest subway station. I missed it by a good 700 meters and found a different one – that’s what I get for asking guards and shopkeepers for relative directions as I go (“Excuse me, where’s the [...] In the midst of lesson planning at my desk I’ve also had the TV turned towards me on Chinese programming. I’ve just realized that I’ve been engrossed in a children’s program for the last 10 straight minutes. I understand it! ***** Yesterday’s class went extremely well. We taught the pre-teens some film genre vocabulary – watching [...] Taught a group of juniors (here that means 11-13 year olds) today for the first time. They were incredibly shy and reluctant to join in the activities that we’ve been instructed to prescribe to them. I imagine they aren’t used to the animated chaos of some Western teaching methods – either that, or the icebreaker [...] For the first time today I spoke in Chinese to a local and received the response that I had sought (as opposed to getting a beer instead of the green tea I asked for…that’ll dog me for a while). I didn’t understand what the hell the lady was saying, but it seemed vaguely about [...] |
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