How This Semester is Shaping Up

Cherry Blossoms

Well I’d better post this now while I have the chance. This semester has been extremely busy and flying by at an extraordinary pace. Each semester requires us communication teachers to put together listening exams for our courses. However, in order to make it fair, we need to create NEW exams each time. That sounds like a no-brainer but the very real fact of teaching IELTS is that many of our students have bought, studied and read much of the IELTS material out there. As a result, if we’re not careful, they’ll simply memorize the answers. All that is to say, I have to re-write an A and B exam and submit it to the office two weeks before the exam is to take place. If you’re a student and ever wondered who makes your exams, well, look no further. It’s the guy standing at the front of your class.

The weather has warmed up considerably over the last few weeks. This happened last year too when it seemed that all of a sudden we went from wintry coldness to seeing flowers all over the place. I made time to go out and see the cherry blossoms that covered Yuyauntan Park about an hour away from my campus. I’ve put some photos up on Instagram if you want to have a look.

Cherry Blossom Tree

I’ve been slow to begin my Chinese lessons again because of the aforementioned workload. However, I bought a copy of William McNaughton’s Reading and Writing Chinese 3rd Edition in order to help me learn the multitude of Chinese characters. It’s a good book and it comes highly recommended. Now if I only had the time to sit down and follow the study method it describes. In any event, I pick it up from time to time and try to memorize the sound for each of the simple characters so I can then build into the larger, more complex characters. I have another post in which I update you on my progress in learning the Chinese language.

My reading is going well enough, but I don’t think I’ll hit my 24-book goal. Currently I’ve finished three books for the year: Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster, Michael Chrichton’s Travels, and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. The first was enjoyable enough and I started it before I left for my winter vacation and finished it afterwards. I actually had to put it on hold because I didn’t want to interfere with what I saw during my trip in February. Chrichton’s book wasn’t so much about travelling so much as it was about some of the realizations he came to while travelling. Some were insightful while others were rather bland. He spent a lot of time discussing energy fields, hypnosis and other new age therapies that really didn’t fit the description of “Travels”. Finally, Murakami’s book was enjoyable (as always), though I found the first 50 pages and last hundred pages rather difficult to get through.

So that’s three and now I’m making my way through Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, a book that apparently has many allegories to the period between the 1950s and 1970s in China. I also have yet to finish the Penguin History of Modern China which I started last year and got most of the way through.

So that’s just a little update on what’s going on. I am working on a few posts about a typical week for me here in China. I hope to have that up sometime this month (seeing as though my schedule changes every semester).

Ah yes, and I’d be remiss not to mention that this past April 4th marked the sixth year I’ve been keeping some form of blog alive. Sadly, I have not published nearly as much as I would’ve liked but the current 239 posts means that I post on average about once a week. I have no intention of stopping yet, especially since Facebook has been reminding me of what I was doing four years this day (pulling weeds and harvesting grapes in South Australia). It’s also been six years since I travelled through SE Asia for the first time (and started this blog) and seven (!!!) years since I first taught English in South Korea.


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