David's Big Adventure in China

I’ve been busy with my teaching recently and next week is mid-term exams week. I’ve also been busy making some travel plans for a couple upcoming holidays and for the summer vacation. For summer vacation I’m planning on going to Japan for 3 weeks with the first 2 weeks being a guided tour with Intrepid Tours and then I’ll try doing the last week on my own. After Japan I think I’ll come back to China and do some traveling within China. Anyone want to come join me? For my winter break next year I’m thinking about going to Egypt.

I’m planning on staying here at Guangxi University for another year which will take me to July 2010. After that, I am hoping to become an IELTS Examiner. IELTS is an English exam for people that want to demonstrate their English proficiency and is used by many western universities as a factor in evaluating admission for foreign students. The work is mostly on weekends but apparently I can make as much money as I make now by working 3 weekends a month. That job would also give me much more flexibility regarding when I can take vacation time. I’d really like to be able to travel when not everyone else is traveling and this job would make that easier. Tentatively, my next visit to USA will be in summer or early fall of 2010.

Exiting News Flash! – I bought a toaster oven and now I can make toast and cook other things. It cost me about $80 U.S. I could have bought one cheaper but the clerk at Wal-mart (there are sales people readily available in every department at Wal-marts here to assist you) convinced me to buy the imported model instead of the Chinese made model. So recently, for the first time since I moved to China I purchased butter and salt and pepper. I started cooking a little bit but it’s just not worth the effort to do much cooking considering the poor kitchen facility (no hot water, I have to move the cooktop to use it, etc.). I was so excited the first time I made toast…..lol. One thing I cooked was spaghetti but the spaghetti sauce I bought at Wal-mart was really just tomato sauce with no seasoning.

Recently while grading some writing assignments I found that more than 10% of the students had plagiarized. One student was a student I caught twice last semester doing this. After the second time last semester I gave her a 0 for that assignment and made her write a paper titled “What is Plagiarism”. When I caught her this time, I told her I am reducing her score for the entire semester by 6 points. She came back to see me later with another student to help translate because she is not confident in her spoken English. She said she was only trying to improve her scores and how could she improve them because she was not happy with her final score the previous semester. I reminded her that her score on her previous writing assignment was 92 and that her writing is good so she just needs to quit trying to cheat! The assignment she plagiarized on was her journals which are not directly graded for writing quality. Sometimes Chinese thinking drives us crazy……lol.

I have posted some new pictures from trips to a couple parks and the zoo, and a picture of our students performing the play “High School Musical” (they did it in English and did a great job). They are in the folder GU (Guangxi University) under “Recent Pictures”. As a reminder, you can find the link for the pictures on the right hand side of the blog. Until next time….