Work Update

I need to work on my Chinese listening skills.

"Professor John" as previously mentioned is actually my new boss, Professor Zhang. She specializes in entrepreneurship and sustainability in third-world countries. I will be working with her on new project where I will be teaching upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students advanced communication and speaking/conversational skills. We will be focusing on the rhythm and flow of texts and the importance of sentence and paragraph structures. My meeting today was brief, but I think I have a good understanding of what will be expected of me. I'm supposed to compile rough syllabus by Friday and will be meeting again with Professor Zhang, her assistant, Louis, and our class advisors.

I've looked up some of Professor Zhang's previous work and I'm thoroughly impressed. She's done a lot of work with policy making in the Asian-Pacific region. She seemed impressed with my background and would really like to take the classes on a field trip to the rural areas outside of Tianjin so that she could show me what life is like for the farmers out there.

I'm really excited.

Really really excited.

I've been reading a lot about the difficulties Chinese students face when trying to learn the English language and customs. I find it quite interesting. One site has mentioned that the difficulty Chinese students have in understanding English culture (not just American culture) is because they are taught that traditional Confucian culture, Communist culture, village culture, and family culture all come before school and classroom culture. Basically, what has been ingrained in these students long before they ever spoke a word of Mandarin will keep them from communicating in a Western way. Loyalty in traditions, country, and family all come before integration into a classroom setting. In a lot of ways, I can see how this would help in the education process, but I think the value of imagination and adaptation is lost. And this is what I hope to teach my students. The ability to think on one's feet has become critical in our culture and I haven't seen a lot of that ability so far.

I'm sure that I'm hoping to accomplish much more than what I will be able to in such a short amount of time, but I hope to bring some sort of awareness of the world around them to these students. Hopefully I can get that much through to them.