November

I want to give a recap of November, given that I have not posted to this blog in a while. In the middle of the month I was busy with midterm exams and late in November I took a Chinese proficiency exam for foreigners and minorities in China (all non-native speakers).

I’ve also been working at a new ESL school a few weekdays and every weekend. I haven’t had a lot of English classes to teach, instead my responsibilities have been replaced with other things such as putting together lesson plans for single classes and curriculums for nine- and ten-month courses. The school has hired a few foreign teachers, and it has been my responsibility to recruit and interview them. The Chinese teachers that are hired I interview briefly once to judge their English skills and pronunciation.

I also do simple training sessions with the Chinese staff about once a week. With the office staff, which includes a few receptionists, a number of marketers, an accountant and an IT guy, we work on practical and fairly basic English skills. They are fun because they screw up a lot and love to laugh and joke around with each other. The other training sessions are with the Chinese English teachers and a few administrators who have advanced English skills so we practice more specific skills. I like them because I normally work closely with them so I know them well. They are also able to express their ideas well in English and tackle more difficult subjects, so the sessions are more serious and productive. I also do a lot of translating and editing of all sorts of documents. I was the only foreign teacher a couple months ago when the school opened – I was there at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and now we have a handful of teachers and a few full classes of students and couple of students who take one-on-one classes with me.

The exam last Sunday, the HSK, is taken by thousands of people across the country a few times of year. In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking the Chinese exam that later became the HSK. In 2005, the number of candidates has risen sharply to 117,660.

You can also take it in the US, where Chinese is the fastest growing foreign language. Although the number of students learning Chinese is tiny compared with how many study Spanish or French. But one report shows that pre-college enrollment nearly quadrupled between 1992 and 2002, from 6,000 to 24,000. When the College Board polled schools a couple years ago about offering an Advanced Placement program for Chinese, it expected perhaps a few hundred to say they were interested. Instead, 2,400 high schools said they wanted to offer the class.

The HSK on Sunday was the same day as the Shanghai Marathon. I ran in that marathon last year after training for 9-10 months. Learning Chinese is a mental marathon but this one required more involved and patient preparation than a real marathon. I prepared for that exam through nearly two and half years of studying and a couple months of doing practice exams. I think I did okay and hopefully it’s the first step in moving beyond being a Chinese language student and English teacher to doing other things in China. There’s a lot of things in China I want to do, such as writing, research, translation, or business, so having a good command of the language and some experience living in China will me help jump into new things.
One goal that I accomplished was getting an essay published in a little newspaper for and by foreign students at Nanjing Normal University. It was an essay written for a class assignment to write a story about animals so I wrote about visiting Gibraltar and seeing the monkeys there. Along with the honor of seeing my writing published in Chinese, I was also paid ¥10 ($1.50) for it!

Elsewhere in China in November, Obama made a visit to Shanghai and Beijing, in addition to Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Obama mania extends to some to China in some ways.

As is typical in Chinese official functions (this is also the case in the US for the most part), all the politics, speeches, press conferences, and strategic dialogues didn’t make a stir. Instead, the country was captivated by the fact that Obama carried his own umbrella in the rain and by an attractive young female university student in a red coat. Obama did bring up freedom of speech and access to information in answering a question about Twitter being blocked in China, which was nice to hear.