Where we've been...

Where have we been during the last month since leaving Beijing? Well, let me tell you.  We began teaching English on July 7.  Our first teaching assignment was for 2 weeks with the Pukou School District, in the northern part of Nanjing city.  We loved teaching with this district, and had some wonderful experiences, as well as met some truly exceptional people!

  Our teaching positions here were through the Jiangsu (province) Educational Services International Exchange program.  The provincial government here pays each summer for nearly 100 teachers to come from America, Australia/New Zealand, and Canada to come and teach their public school English teachers.  The focus is on improving their English listening and speaking, as well as to expose them to Western educational methods.  It is an impressive program, and we feel very fortunate to have found it and to have been allowed to participate.  

Teaching English all day has been fun, if sometimes draining.  We realized the other day, after we've now been doing it for four weeks, that basically what our lessons consist of is playing party games with a class of adult teachers for 5 hours a day.  The games are all language-based, but they make using the language fun.  It's fun for us, but as most of you know, Jon and I are not party people, so playing these sorts of game on a regular, prolonged basis gets pretty tiring.  But, overall, we have really really enjoyed the experience.  It has given us the chance to get to know Chinese culture on a much more personal and profound level.  Our lessons are also theme-based, in that each day we focus on one cultural theme and share Western cultures related to that theme, as well as get our students to tell us the Chinese cultures related to that theme.  It has really been so fun to be able to get to know the culture so well in this way.

               This is the picture of my class in Pukou -- they are all Elementary English teachers.
            Jon had a class of middle school teachers, here he is teaching them.

    They took us on a weekend trip to visit some nearby sites.  This is a giant Buddha -- the toes were even longer than mine!!
They took such great care of us, their attentiveness and hospitality was overwhelming.  These are pictures of the beautiful hotel suite that they put us up in.


    On our weekend trip, we visited a phenomenal Chinese garden.  Here we are smelling the lotuses (or is that loti?).
We've met lots of great people here in China, but we think our favorite Chinese person we've met here was Mr. He.  He was the asst. principal of the school we were teaching at, and we just loved getting to know him.
   This is the staff (and family members) of the district that hosted us. We all traveled together to Suzhou for our weekend trip.  They introduced us to lotus blossoms!

Thanks, Pukou, for such a wonderful experience!