Change Change Change

Ah it's so nice to have a post without a number in the title. The new semester has started at school, actually its been going on for some time now and number of things are different. For starters theirs been some personnel changes. Clark and his girlfriends have gone off to Shanghai where he now works for some sort of college their. He says it's more work but the pay is better. Jason is also gone to somewhere up North to study Chinese more. He spoke the most Chinese of any westerner I knew around here but he still had a lot more to learn. It's interesting that if you speak any Chinese at all all the Chinese people will come up and say how good you are, but the more you learn the more likely they are to tell you how far you have to go. The picture I have is of the stuff Jason left behind. Clark cleared out his place pretty good before he left but Jason seems to have just taken a few things and left everything else. The cleaning people took several days to clean out all the junk that he left behind and for a while a bunch of it was piled in the hall way. There was all sorts of stuff in that pile I even saw a mostly unopened bottle of anti-Malaria medication.

I've also started classes. I only have 10 hours, that's five classes, at the school. Three of my classes are freshmen education majors and they are just great. I've been doing a lot more group activities this semester and the students have really responded. They don't speak Chinese very much in class, though I still need to crack down more on it, and they are just really good at doing whatever I ask them to do. I've been taking attendance every day and I've had very few students miss any classes. I know some of the student's names though this seems to only create more problems as the others are unhappy I don't know theirs. I usually know the name of the class monitor and a few of the most outspoken students in each class. In my first class Kobe, I bet you can guess who he picked his name for, is the class monitor and one other boy took the name of Holly even after learning it was a girls name just to be a trouble maker. In the second class there is Winter, a guy who wanted a seasonal name and when I explained that Summer, Spring, and Autumn were girls names he went with Winter, who is one of my tutors. In my third class there is Echo who is about 4 foot 4 and the class monitor. She talks a lot but likes to joke around in Chinese too much.

I also have two classes of the same students going to England from last semester. One student is gone she apparently got married so she is no longer planning on going to England. She had pretty good English but was a bit of a complainer. There is also one new student Jaquelin who is pretty much tied with Rose for best student in the class. Carrie, Teddy's assistant and some times reader of this blog, is also planning on going but she doesn't come to my classes. Jaquelin, Rose, and Carrie all have good enough English to take classes in England but I'm still worried if even they can pass. I had them write papers and they complained bitterly about it and what they handed in was really bad. It would have been close to failing for a high school level paper and they are some how supposed to do post-graduate work.

I've also started to study Chinese more formally. I've got three tutors, actually four but two do it at the same time. It's definitely helpful to have a more structured approach to learning Chinese. There is one new English teacher here, Amy from Newfoundland. She lives in the apartment across the hall from me and there is a link now to her blog in my links section. The weather this semester hasn't been that cold, though it did rain a ton in March, and recently its turned really warm. I was finally able to buy a fan after being laughed at in two stores for trying to buy one out of season. Some things are difference but really most things are pretty much the same. The internet will not work for long stretches of time with no real reason. The school tells us incredibly late about any changes to class and the construction of the new library continues basically around the clock. It's nice to be back though.