Spring Semester Starts!

February 23, 2009 - school starts!

School finally got started again! Never thought I was going to be excited about school starting, but we've been back from our spring vacation since Jan. 26, almost a month ago. We've done some short trips, such as visiting the "Thousand Buddha Mountain", "Baotuoquan Springs", and a few other places, but most of the time we were reading, surfing, shopping, and in general, preparing for the new semester.

Our new semester is awesome. I have all my 5 classes of sophomores and 2 classes of freshmen back, plus we picked up two more freshmen classes. Since Elwin would not be having his junior writing classes this semester, he and I will be sharing the 9 classes. As it turned out we are going to be team teaching 5 classes, and each teaches 2 individually. It seems to be more work but with large class size of 50 and more in each class, the students will benefit from this set up as long as we don't kill each other first. :-) Amazingly enough, we both are excited to give this a try.

The administration scheduled us to teach on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, so we can go on trips visiting China on other days. We love the administrators here. They are very considerate of our situations here. They invited us to attend their first faculty meeting on Friday, Feb. 20. Most of the people attending were adjunct professors, instructors and a few professors. The highlight was meeting the English reading, English listening teachers and medical English teachers. Since we are teaching the same students, it was especially helpful to meet them and share ideas with them.

As one can see, Shandong University medical students take a lot of English classes. Their textbooks are in English and the instructors are supposed to teach them in English. Most professors prepared their materials in English, but speak to the students in Chinese. Since medical students have to have the highest entrance exam scores, they are the cream of the crop and are treated very well. The majority of these students are hardworkers and care very much or too much about their achievements (test scores). Taking off a point on any assignment can be a shock to them. They would come and ask what they could do to improve.

We are in for a wonderful semester!