Journal Entry 12: Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Look at this delightful email I got from one of my student-hosts, Mimzy.  
May 25, 2010
Dear Mr. Shaner,

        Hello! This is Mimzy. Mimzy Du, not Mimzy Don't, haha~ How is it going? Your public speech about "Elevator Speeches" yesterday were really appreciated. I learned a lot from it and thank you so much! Besides, the candies "Generous Steve" gave us were so delicious and I hope that you can express my grateful feeling to him~ ^o^ 

        And I wonder that if you can send some "memories" about the sweet days we spent together. If so, I will be so happy that I can have the same wonderful "memories" just like you, too.^o^

        So through this, I guess you can get my e-mail address, right? Haha. Cindy and I will try our best to help you five when you are here, and we really hope that you will enjoy every minute of your trip here. Oh yes, please don't say "Thank you so much", you know, we are special friends, right? So it's our pleasure to be with you and we are so happy that we can be a little helpful to you. ^o^

        Have a nice day and give my best wishes to you!                                   

Sincerely yours,
Mimzy Du

Mimzy Du is one of our student-hosts.  She is a freshman English major that already has pretty good speaking skills.  She has worked as our translator many times here already.  Mimzy is very petite and looks about 12 years old.  She has a lot of energy and is just bouncing all the time.  She has big, bright, brown eyes and is just as cute as a button!  I had been teasing her about her name, calling her “Mimzy Don’t.”  Her friends didn’t get my joke but, because of her English skills, she did and thought it was hilarious.

Today, I was up and at ‘em for a visit to Gary Gearhart’s 8:00 a.m. class.  The class is primarily girls, as are many of the English classes.  There were about 25 girls and only two guys in the class.  I went through the usual, who I am, where I’m from, etc. and then took questions.  They seemed particularly interested in what I had to say and asked a lot of questions regarding how to gain entrance to American Universities such as Harding.  I stayed for the first half of the class and left at the break.

The classes here are set up as one hour and 40 minute classes with a break of 10-15 minutes somewhere in the middle as the teacher determines.  They have classes scheduled at 8:00 and 10:00 in the morning.  When the 10:00 a.m. class ends at 11:40 the whole school shuts down a bit for lunch and rest.  The next class is not scheduled until 3:00 p.m.  No 1:00 p.m. class.  They go back to their rooms and take a nap!  Then all classes resume at 3:00, 5:00 and 8:00 p.m.  I had done pretty well at my jet lag and getting my clock turned around, but I think that was partially due to me NOT taking a lot of scheduled naps.  But this day was going to be my first class to teach at 8:00 p.m.  That’s late for me to start a class so I went Chinese yesterday and took a nap at 1:00 p.m. or so and slept for about an hour and 45 minutes!  It was great. I think I’m going to like the Chinese class schedule.

I then worked on my class materials for the evening class.  At one point I was in one of the faculty offices (that are NOT air conditioned), getting some handouts printed.  I must have been sweating profusely because one of the teachers asked me if she could get me some water.  That sounded great!  She then brought me a cup of water that was HOT water.  Not just lukewarm, room temperature hot, but steaming hot water!  I just don’t get it, but that’s what they do here.

My 8:00 p.m. class was a speech class.  It was a class that was supposed to be preparing for a competitive speech contest.  I spoke about Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric and went through my speech outline template straight out of my self-written ESL material.  I offered the students a digital copy of my handout if they emailed me and requested such.   So far I’ve only had one student make the request but for all of those that do make the request I send them my PowerPoint back right away.

One student came up to me after class and explained that she had not yet selected an American nickname, and that she had heard about me naming “Kitty.”  She wanted to know if I would select a name for her as well!   We talked for a few minutes so I could get a sense of her personality.  I proceeded to give her a few choices.  She wanted it to start with the letter “H.”  I suggested Hannah, Haley, or Hillary.  I knew that Hillary was a very popular name that we all know and... well, I also knew that teenaged girls here knew about Hannah Montana and Hillary Duff, and the phenomena that they are worldwide. She is going to let me know which one she settles on.  Who knew I would be naming babies (OK, OK, teen-aged girls) when I got here?