Teaching English and Learning How to Juggle

Yesterday I taught three classes at an English school in Oxford. It was great to be in the classroom again (as a teacher). It was also a relief to have mixed classes. In China, I very rarely had students who weren't from China. In my classes yesterday, each class had at least 1 Chinese student, but the rest of the students were from all over- Brazil, Sweden, Iran, Peru, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Argentina, etc. It was a whole different teaching experience... and one that I really enjoyed. It was refreshing to have students respond to activities with different perspectives. It got to the point in China (from fairly early on, actually), that I could pretty much predict what the students would say. For example, if you're talking about celebrities, my Chinese students often wanted to talk about Michael Jackson, Audrey Hepburn, Madonna, Julia Roberts (or "big mouth" as they often described her).

Yesterday in class, the students had to write down a few sentences to describe a celebrity that they thought the others might know, and then read them outloud for others to guess. I was pleasantly surprised that the students were talking about current celebrities and their recent songs or movies. It might not change the world, but it was refreshing to hear. I understand why it is the way it is in China; just imagine if you took a Chinese class and you were asked to describe a Chinese celebrity- most people in the class would probably choose one of three people: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, or Zhang Zi Yi.

The other interesting thing was that many of the students were able to guess a word's meaning or come up with an actual word based on their own language, which just can't be done with Chinese, except for the words that they borrowed from us, eg. ke le (for cola), mai dan lao (mc donald's), or beng ji (bungee), etc.

Things haven't been too exciting here; I've been working on a textbook for a Chinese publisher in between going to class and doing my other website, so I've been rather busy. I did find time to learn how to juggle though, which is pretty exciting- and good exercise, too :) (I'm not joking about the exercise- you can really work up a sweat throwing a few balls around!) The longest I've been able to go for so far has been about 30 throws with the three balls, but Rich is a pretty good teacher, so I feel pretty confident that I'll be able to do some fancy stuff with it soon.