First Days of Classes

I've just finished my first week of teaching. It turns out I'm teaching 425 students! Kind of nuts. I have 9 classes in which I'm teaching 18 hours. But the nice thing is I only have to come up with 2 lesson plans a week. I teach 4 freshmen classes and 5 sophomore classes. The material overlaps.

Hah, but that's just it! I just said "the material." That is a bit misleading. So when they were giving me my schedule (4 days before classes began), I was given these requirements: "teach the freshmen 'survival English' and the sophomores how to express their opinions." ...That's it. No curriculum. no textbook! And what makes it so daunting is that this university is the number one engineering school in China (and overall in the top 5), so no slacking off here. What's more, I've found that the students' English is really stinking good. :) I had no idea going in, but by the end of the first day with the sophomores I was describing the difference between subjectivity and objectivity and they already had the vocabulary for it! Should be an interesting semester... But I'm looking forward to it!

I'm sorry I didn't take any pictures of the first days, but let me just describe some things. I had them play a few games, one was a name game. They got in circles of about 15 and went around sharing their names in counter-clockwise order while repeating the names of those who came before them - a sort of memory game. The twist was, in addition to saying their name, they had to add a silly action. For example, the first person would say something like "Hi, my name is Timmy" then rub his belly and tap his head. The next person would say "This is Timmy (rub his belly and tap his head), my name is Jake" then put out a piece sign, etc down the line. One guy said his name, and for his action turned to face the wall and punched it HARD!! I happened be looking in that direction at the time, and it made a loud noise - had to have hurt! Everyone in his group was like "what the heck?!" and rolling with laughter. The guy's face turned red... I thought it appropriate to change his action to punching into his own hand. Didn't want the rest of his group punching the wall... That dude was hardcore. The other cool thing I discovered is that I can play movies in class pretty easily through a projector. I'm thinking of showing some "Friends" episodes and having them re-enact them. Something tells me this would be very entertaining. I'll try to take videos... :)

dc