What's Your Name

So today was the first day of class at the new school. My classes are a little different in Alaer then they were in Changzhou. First I have every class more than once a week, I teach 16-18 hours a week, depending on if it's an even or an odd week, but I only actually see four groups of students. Two groups are sophomore English majors. I've meet a few of them and they seem about on par with some of the Changzhou students. Another class is sophomore Uyghur students, the minority students are segregated into their own classes for some reason dealing with Chinese level. They have pretty good English and seem like fun students. My last class, which I see 3-4 times a week, is a group of freshmen Uyghur students; this class is just hard. I don't think I've ever taught students on this low a level. I'm going to have to start rethinking a lot of my activities. What's more that class is HUGE about 45 students.

I had six hours today, classes here are actually 10 minutes shorter then in Changzhou consisting of two 45 minute periods. Mostly besides the level the class went a lot like the classes in Changzhou, but one big difference was when it came to names. No one really had an English name and I didn't want to push to hard in making them take one, I figure they have a life of being push around ahead of them, so I was stuck trying to write down and pronounce dozens of Uyghur names. This was harder then you would think given that often the students are a little unsure about how to spell their own names in English. This took an amazingly long time, like more than half the class. What's more in the big class I got a little tired of it near the end and asked the class monitor to fill in the rest of the names, in my next class it turned out that she did a terrible job of it and I basically had to start over, taking another half of a class. Also when I was trying to put someones name on the board for talking in Uyghur during class I basically just ended up putting their student number up instead since it was taking too long to figure out their name all over again. I don't like reducing people to a number but there's only so long this can take.