Christmas in china and New year！

Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve written an update. This month has been very stressful because I am teaching in china with a business visa. So I constantly need to have it extend it. I needed to get it extended early January, which is not a good time because they have time off and are out of the office. However my company managed to get it extended a day after its expiration. This is the second time I needed to get extended so I need to leave the country and come back!

My company is getting me a Z visa and has filed the papers. However they made a mistake and said I am to Hong Kong instead of the London embassy. Hong Kong is interesting however it would cost me a month of wages (at least). My advice to people coming here to work is don’t come out to china unless the company has provided you with a z visa in the first place！

However it is not all doom and gloom in china. I did a week of Christmas lessons teaching them about our traditions and food e.g. Christmas pudding. I did this by showing them a power point slide show. This lesson was successful as the students seemed really interested in finding out about our customs. They seem to think all eat are hamburgers and fries!  I blame Mac Donald’s and USA marketing!

Some of the computers were broken in a few of the class rooms. So I read them some Christmas poems and taught some vocabulary. Then they had 25 mins to write a short Christmas greeting message or poem. I gave them a few examples. I was disappointed with the class because all the students (who are upper intermediate) had written was merry. 

My classes seem to want to spoon fed everything all the time because they learn everything by rote.  This is an effective to teach vocabulary but doesn’t seem to improve their ability to speak English

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Overall during the Christmas season class seemed to be more enthusiastic than normal. Also I received a card from each of my classes.

They celebrated our New Year, which they call the solar New Year. The students performed in a show they did dancing and signing. It was very impressive there are a lot of talented students here.

Then we back to normal classes. Although I ran out of topics to teach them so I taught them some tongue twisters. This worked out well because I got them practice as a class and by themselves. Then I had some volunteers to say them by themselves. Overall they seemed to enjoy the lesson.

The week after that I focused on practicing pronunciation and then teaching them a song you’ve got a friend in me. They didn’t like the song so they didn’t participate. Next time I will choose a pop song or a song from high school musical, which is popular here.  

Finally in the last week the Chinese teacher caught up with my class so I could teach the last topic war and peace. I got student to read an article about Winston Churchill and answer some questions. Then I taught them a few words and had the class go through a short part of one his famous speeches. A lot of students found this very difficult.

My class was cancelled last minute because they felt the students needed to time to revise for exams.( A decision that could have been made earlier)  So I’ve had the week off ，which is a good thing because I have been under the weather.

Now I am preparing to fly to London as planned. Then I will be flying to Hong Kong to get my z visa and then back for next term in March. So this will be last update until then.