Career Couch

The other day I sat down with a student to talk about her upcoming interview with a foreign company. She is two decades older than me and the potential salary at the job is five times what I make. I've had about three jobs in my life that didn't involve serving food. And somehow, here I am, telling people who are almost twice my age not to focus on their weak points during the interview and not to write about their hobbies on a resume. I realize that the people I am talking about, asking me for career advice when they have had jobs for longer than I have had adult teeth, often started out in the days when the government was assigning jobs. There are good reasons that they don't know how to write an English-language resume or interview with a foreign boss and I do. None of those reasons have anything to do with one person being smarter than the other. But it is a crazy world where someone who probably couldn't get a job as a waitress in New York anymore is handing out interview advice to upper management in China.

lesson plan: Droodles

Culture: Droodles

Introduction (10 minutes):

1.draw a droodle (e.g., Bubblegum Champion) on the board. Elicit from students what it is.
2.Key vocabulary: caption, humor, riddle, doodle
3.Popular in the 1950s and 1960s

Small group work (15 minutes):

Give each group a droodle or two to write a caption for and present to the rest of the class.

Allow 5-10 minutes for presentations.

Small group work (remainder):

Have students draw their own droodles and draw them on the board for the rest of the class. Have the class suggest captions and give the intended captions after one or two guesses.

Materials:

Handout and www.droodles.com examples

lesson plan: Olympian Gods and Goddesses

Culture: The twelve Olympian Gods and Goddesses

Introduction (10 minutes):

1.Where is Mount Olympus? Where is Greece? (elicit from students)
2.Ancient Greece as the cradle of Western civilization.
3.God and goddesses in religion and drama (myths)

Quiz (10 minutes) & go over answers (10 minutes)

Students probably won’t know very many answers, more a way to introduce the most important facts.

Reading myths (20 minutes)

Students read abridged versions of myths in small groups and decide how to re-tell the myth the class.

Presentations (remainder)

Myths (varied by level):

Pandora’s box

Odysseus and the Cyclops

Narcissus and Echo

Lesson plans!!!

Blogger is blocked in China (again) and I haven't been posting lately. I'll be posting some lesson plans that I have made for the culture class I teach on Mondays. It is an open class so the lessons are geared towards a multi-level group. The class is called "culture," the school's choice not mine, I am not an anthro professor. They're supposed to be language class that just uses culture as a topic. A lot of English students in China don't give a damn about the culture of English-speaking countries, so I try not to shove it down their throats, just give them enough so that they understand the basic references.

Sober up

From the New Yorker:

"Sobering fact of the day: Only eleven per cent of Americans think it is very important to learn Chinese, while eighty-two per cent of Chinese think it is very important to learn English. This, thanks to surveys conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, described today at the National Chinese Language Conference. (Comforting fact: Despite the survey results, the conference is packed, with nearly nine hundred educators intent on expanding Chinese-language education. Chicago Public Schools have the largest Chinese-teaching program in America, with twelve hundred students learning Chinese. )"

I know that as a globally-conscious American I am supposed to be beating myself up about how Americans don't adequately learn foreign languages. If I were to recommend anything to young students it would be to learn to speak a foreign language and to use that language so that they don't forget it. But I totally object to the comparison being made above. Learning English for Chinese people is not the same as learning Chinese for American people. It might shock some people out there, but Chinese people don't learn English just so they can communicate with Americans. My students learn English to communicate with Australians, French, Germans, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesioans, & etc. Learning English is to kill a couple hundred birds with one stone. In contrast, the number of countries speaking Putonghua (commonly called Mandarin Chinese in English) is one. Sure there are more than a billion people here, but a lot of them don't speak Putonghua either. The point is, don't flatter yourself America. Chinese people aren't learning English just to talk to you, they're learning English to talk to all the people out there who don't speak Chinese. There are a lot of them.

We are cursed in a way because we speak the lingua franca of a large part of the world (when are they going to change that to lingua ingla or something?). There is little incentive to learn another language. And I have found that that remains true even in a place like China where lots of people don't speak English very well and still don't paticularly encourage others to have a whack at their language. So Evan Osnos and the Chicago Public School System and everyone else who has Hanzi in their eyes, don't learn Chinese to keep up with that stereotype of the studious Asian, do it because it is hard and will challenge your brain, do it because ethnocentrism is so last century, do it because even though the odds that you might ever need to use it are pretty slim (I know from experience) you might get get lucky and actually need it. It is like learning CPR, but waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more difficult.

Mid-term

Had my first mid-term this morning. It was ok... certainly they're more fun to give than to take. We'll see how it turns out.

Propaganda

As I was double-checking the pinyin (Romanization of Chinsese characters) for the Chinese word for "easy" while studying for my midterm next week I came across a little piece of propaganda in my very own dictionary:

"Simplified characters are much easier than complicated forms."

Decades ago, in a (misguided) attempt to increase literacy, the Chinese government developed a new system of writing their character that made some of them a bit easier to write. This system is referred to as simplified Chinese (who knew?). The characters used in Taiwain, Hong Kong, and Macau are usually called "traditional," unless you're my dictionary or someone trying to justify why changing the words made it somehow easier for people to read.