China Teacher's Training

From the 2nd thru 15th of August, we completed some intensive (100 hours) training at BYU for our China teaching adventure.  We were trained with many of the other new teachers going to different universities in China.  There were about seventy of us in a rather small conference room at the Kennedy Center at BYU in the Harold R Clark building just south of the Library.  Our day started at 7:15 AM when we left the house, and we usually got home around 9:00 PM. We enjoyed most of the content. Surprisingly, we didn't hate the "China History" part. The Kennedy Foundation brought in a marvelous speaker who was very well organized, very well spoken, and fairly good looking as well. He concentrated on the last two dynasties, and did a great job in keeping us interested, as well as educating us about China's past.

We had classes in "survival Chinese," where they tried to teach us some basic Mandarin. We found this to be pretty frustrating. Thank goodness we only had an hour a day at it. They taught us how to pronounce the "PinYing" (Chinese sounds written out in romanized letters).  They gave us some laminated cards with everything we might have to say to a Taxi Driver to help us maneuver around our city.

We spent a lot of time being trained on how to teach English as a second language (TESL). Our main goal is to get these university students to feel comfortable speaking American English -- fixing their pronunciation problems, and teaching them English idioms. We now have a pretty good idea of how to go about it. Wish us luck!!!

Oh yes, I guess I didn't tell you. . . we're going to Jinan.  It's a city that's about a 2 1/2 hour bullet-train ride south of Beijing. We're not sure if it has 2.8 million or 6.5 million population. We've seeing conflicting data. But there are mountains surrounding the city, and despite the pollution, it looks like a nice place.

Our teaching assignment starts on September 6th, and our contract ends on July 16, 2011. We're flying out tomorrow, the 30th of August. That will give us a few days to get our feet under us, and get over jet-lag before we have to start teaching.

There will be at least five couples in the CTP from BYU/Kennedy Foundation in Jinan. The other couple that isn't in this picture, the Thelins, will be returning for their third year. They have already had the training, so they weren't there with us this day. We're so glad that someone that knows the city and all the ins and outs will be able to show us where to go and how to do everything. We've met with them a couple of times, and they're fun. So I think we'll do fine.

We're going to be living on the 7th floor of the Hanlin Hotel, which is very near the Shandong Normal University, where we'll be teaching. We will have a two bedroom, two bath apartment. We've been told that the kitchen is very sparse -- only a cook-top, microwave, little tiny (hotel sized) refrigerator. We will have a washing machine, but no dryer. I'm hoping that laundry services in Jinan are as cheap as they were in Dhahran.

This is a picture of all the teachers that will be going to China this year. They're all old folks like us. They were a very diverse group as far as occupation and teaching experience. Everyone was very friendly, and we enjoyed getting to know most of them. We will see many of them that are teaching in other cities, on the trips that will be organized for us during the school breaks. We're already signed up for a "Silk Road" trip from Oct. 1-7. There's some kind of national holiday at that time. In January, we'll all be going to Hong Kong for a conference, some shopping, and we'll also be able to attend the temple in Hong Kong.

We were told that China doesn't allow social networking sites, so we're hoping to keep up on our blog with help from our daughter, Andrea. We'll send her our pictures and the text, and we're grateful that she's willing to paste it into this blog site for us. We hope to be able to share our adventure with you all, and we hope that you'll stay in touch with us as well.