9/9/03

Monday

Up at 7am, bright and early for my first set of placement tests at 8. After scoffing down a couple of bits of peanut butter-laden bread, I made my way across to the office where I was to meet Frieda, Les, and the crew. Of course the office I thought we were meeting in was not the office we were actually meeting in. But thanks to my tremendous intuition and sense of 'what's going on' we all managed to find each other. Frieda, Les, the head of the Masters program (have forgotten her name), Maggie, and Ivany were all there. Ivany was at the meeting last Wednesday and is the third teacher. Her English name is rather interesting, she explained it came as a result of her originally picking Ivan from the name book, her teacher telling her that Ivan was a male name, but could be made female by simply adding a 'y', which she then did. Interesting.

We went up to the classrooms where the interrogations would take place. Thankfully the morning was fairly cool (24) as the fans weren't doing the greatest job of cooling things down. We went into the class and were introduced. Mr. Les, Mr. Sam, and Ivany's chinese name was used. Then it was off to the next classroom where we would talk to the students individually. Les took the first few through to give Ivany and I an idea of what exactly we would be doing. It was fairly simple, a short conversation to try and guage what level the students were at. Questions about Family, hometown, hobbies and all things as such.

After about 45 minutes we had gotten through the lot of them, and were pleasantly surprised by their abilities. We had expected a group of students whose English was so poor that Les or I couldn't communicate with them, however this wasn't the case. It is quite remarkable considering a lot of these students come from small towns, farming families, and have never actually spoken to a english speaking foreigner before. It makes sense however, for these students and their families, this is their one shot, if they don't succeed here, then that's it. The family life savings go to waste, and any chance of the family succeeding diminishing extremely. No superannuation, RRSP's, pension plans. The west has it easy, trust me.

The marking system was fairly simple. We basically awarded students either a 1 or 1+ (Beginner), 2 or 2+ (Intermediate), 3 or 3+ (Advanced), to sort them into classes. The idea being that a beginner had trouble communicating in English, an intermediate student could communicate, but was translating, and had a little trouble both constructing sentences and understanding when speech was accelerated. The advanced students were comfortable speaking, and could understand me when I sped up and stopped pronouncing every word, however not necessarily indicating a large vocabulary (we were asking fairly basic questions).

By the end of the first group's oral tests, we had a clump of 2's and not many 1's or 3's. We would have to separate them into 3 fairly even groups regardless. Back into the classroom full of students we went, and Les proceeded to write 3 sentences on the board; one with spelling mistakes, and two with continuation required. We did this to double check our oral testing results, and to see where the class was at writing-wise. After 5 minutes we went back, marked them all, and Les compared them with our original grades. No problems.

By 12 O'Clock we had gotten through 2 classes, and called it a day. We had a small meeting to sort out office supplies, textbooks, and all things exciting. Les and I discussed the contract situation, and came to the conclusion that it was basically up to them: Remove the breach of contract clause, or find other teachers. We were both feeling more comfortable about the job itself, however weren't about to take any unnecessary risks.

I spent the rest of the afternoon bumming around the apartment. Made a small trip down to the market to pick up a few neccesities, and tried unsuccesfully to sort out the phone and internet. Went down to check out the campus sports scene at about 5, it is something. They have about 10 outdoor basketball courts and they were all full, as was the soccer pitch, and every spare bit of ground that could be used to play some sort of organized game. Spotted Adam and Dr. Jun (Ph. D, Chinese studied in America at U. of Arizona, Director of ESL department, good guy), so went and had a look. Headed back to the apartment after the dust was settled and agreed to head over to the east gate (small restaurants and whatnot, hadn't been yet) for dinner with Adam and a few of the others later on.

We hit the road at about 8. The east gate came alive at night, as soon as you were off university grounds there were a bunch of small hawker-style restaurants and stalls, looked like a good scene. We hit up a restaurant down the back which ended up being fairly good. Adam was there as was Ian (from Whitman, like Adam, but from Oregon originally, just near Portland) and Jin (Chinese, studied at Arizona). We had a fairly good night, a few drinks and good food, and by about 10.20 were on our way back to the apartments.

I hit the sack, and lay there for 4 hours trying to figure out why I was still awake. Very frustrating. Wasn't looking forward to the next morning's 7am start.

- Sam