Classy

What do you do when you've had about two cups of tea too many and you're wide awake in the middle of a Thursday night?

I thought I'd take this chance to see if the Internet would be speedy enough to upload some photos from this week of teaching. 

Each Tuesday afternoon we have three classes give short presentations about Chinese culture.  This a nice way to promote cultural exchange, since the foreign teach about American culture several times a week.  Here are a couple photos:

One of the teachers presenting on Hui culture, with Ningxia highlighted on the map behind

Two of the ladies in my class invited my teammate to come up and try his hand at making a Beijing Duck Roll-up

Here are some other scenes from teaching this week:

My class in the middle of an activity on Task-Based Language Teaching

We had a movie showing (Akeelah and the Bee) and my student brought her sweet baby boy

We had another English corner in the square last night.  Here my teammate Meggi is attracting a crowd with her guitar.

Today during break we took a class picture.

With a girl from my class

With all the ladies in my class

Slogging through a vocabulary activity

I've been having a great teaching experience so far, although it seems like there's a lot less energy in the classroom than when I was teaching classes of forty college students.  For example, all it took to delight my college classes was for me to tell a stupid joke.  Here, I can sing and dance (which would have killed with my college student crowd) and get nothing but some polite smiles.

It's also different for me to teach adults, who have many concerns and responsibilities outside this training program.  They are absent a lot more often and sometimes seem distracted or tired, especially now that Ramadan has started.

Nonetheless, we are all warming up to each other and they've been nothing but friendly and patient with me.  Today they were all proud because they did some relay races in another foreign teachers' culture lesson and beat the other classes every time.  I spent this evening in the home of one of the locals from my class, which was a great experience.  I'm hoping for some more good memories in this last week of teaching.