Rolling

Today we got rolling on orientation. At 8:30 AM we gathered in the room we will use all week, the room that will serve as a teacher break room during the teaching weeks. The multi-purpose building where we will hold classes and plenary sessions is relatively new, and the classrooms are large.

Yesterday we saw the classroom for the first time. About 80 desks spread neatly across the room, each with a small chair. In the course of about an hour I managed to stack all but 21 of the desks and chairs across the back of the room to give us space to move around and work. The final 21 I put together to form a long wide table for team meetings and lunches.

Clearing the desks from the room was the first step. Cleaning up the floor was the second. Around the corner near the bathrooms I found a small broom to help move a collection of dust bunnies, straws, wadded papers, and plain old dirt into a pile and then across the hall to the wastebaskets. Today’s shopping trip included the purchase of a real broom and dustpan, not only for classrooms but also for our hotel rooms that always seem to need more cleaning than the staff provide.

Today included orientation to the curriculum and the modeling of several lessons. In the course of modeling, a number of questions arose on classroom management, potential problems with students, and the logistics of teaching. With more than half the team returning teachers, mentoring of older to newer happens naturally.

We’ve been assigned two assistants. K is a recent grad of a university in the UK and will be our “tea” break, lunch, and room assistant. She arrived this morning with bags of goodies just in case we got hungry between breakfast and lunch. G will be the auditorium guru for sound and lights. Both are former students of some of our teachers and will assist us bountifully.

After lunch another former student, a teacher of Chinese, arrived to teach us survival Chinese. She is patient, careful, and delightful. We made huge mistakes, sounded terrible, and she corrected us, put us back on track, and told us we were wonderful students. Even if we use just half of what she taught today, we will be ahead of the game. We now can be a little polite, can barter, tell a taxi driver how to go left, right, and straight, and we can count to ten, and then beyond because the rest of the numbers build from the original ten digits.

The afternoon ended with a brief lecture on China, Beijing, and the history and scope of the university. By that time minds were fried and all we could think of was sleep. The day was not ready to end though, so a group of us headed down the street to get noodles and vegetables for supper. Tomorrow -- another day!