Fireworks continued

Fireworks~

Street Food!

Stands outside of Trustmart = Korean bbq wrap, fried potstickers, chor (kebabs) for less then five bucks! mmmm...

Our tofu guy at the market with his fresh tofu

Market goodies.

Some of the options at the chicken lady's stand (we get the breasts for cheap because they are considered inferior cuts here!)

Ultimate favourite dumplings- jiao ze. Pork filled, red bean paste filled, garlic and onion filled... you name it, Paul eats it!

Ahh the Great White North!

  

Recently, it snowed here in Jinshitan, making it feel even more like we had actually been tricked into boarding a plane ride to Prince George instead of China. Same smell of industry, similar shades of gray and brown, dead foliage, plastic bottle decorated streets and now even the snow!

In any case, we decided to be brave, and head out into the icy weather (wind chill made it minus 14 C) and make a sojourn down to the beach. Paul had been complaining about living just minutes away from the ocean without having yet gone to see it, and so had promised himself -loudly, and publicly- to make it to the beach before the weekend was over. Somehow he managed to convince Kristen to come with him on this trek despite the weather and off they went into the snow.

Here's Paul doing his best impersonation of Hello Kitty

Most of the other teachers were sensible enough to stay home, but many of the Chinese citizens were not so lucky. On the way to the beach, Paul and Kris dodged trucks full of municipal workers who would get off periodically to shovel a side road by hand, or clean up what the snow plow had missed. They even got to watch a pizza delivery man struggle through three or four inches of snow on his scooter, balancing his pizzas on his lap, while his hair was crusting with snow.

Sampans along the shore at the Jinshitan fishing village

Anyways, we made it down to the beach and got our first view of the Yellow sea. It was really beautiful, and actually kind of mystical with all the fog and snow and wind around, but we definitely are hoping that we will soon be able to make a stroll to the beach without having to bundle up like hedgehogs getting ready to hibernate.

Despite our best efforts, we were unable to restrain Kristen's cheeks from bursting forth from her protective scarf wrapping every few minutes...

China has many cultural achievements.....

Take for instance this artistically designed and iced cake!



And this tableau of the Venus de Milo and some elephants....

Teaching

Both of us are now settled in to our roles as teachers and have finally figured out our teaching assignments. It took a while to get things sorted out for a multitude of reasons: from new students arriving in bunches weeks after the start of the semester, to the junior high not starting for a week after the high school; from teachers not being able to make it to the school for the first day of class because of visa issues, to students moving from one class to another because of their English level. In any case, we now know what classes we will be teaching for the rest of the semester, and can dig into prepping and planning for them.

Kristen is teaching four blocks of ESL classes on the girls high school campus (each block is 75min). Her girls are in grade nine, but because grade nine students in China spend the second half of the school year studying for exams rather then learning any new material, they have been sent to Maple Leaf to practice their English and get their fluency up in order to pass the entrance exams for the Maple Leaf high school. Kristen is teaching two classes of girls both Language Arts (reading and writing skills) and Communication Studies (oral and aural language). She is teaching those students with a higher level of English fluency among the new intake, and is working with several other teachers to prep and plan the course material (which builds off material made in previous years). 

Paul is teaching 6 blocks of Science for grade eights and 2 of ESL English for grade sevens (each block of which is only 45min long). He sees each block three times a week. Because the english level of these students is so low, he often has a Chinese assistant (who by the way has a masters from a Canadian university and has taught for several years... which makes Paul feel wholely underqualified!) work with him to explain some of the harder science vocabulary terms. He is working with this assistant (Xu Meng- Vicky) and another teacher (Petra- from Comox) to develop this new program, which is a pet project of the owner of the school. No pressure! He also teaches two classes of grade sevens an ESL English program with less structure, and a focus on writing. 

The students here are so much fun to work with. Sometimes they are tired (they work long hours and live in dormitories... who wouldn't be at least a little tired!) and  sometimes they are high energy, but the class management problems that you would see in a Canadian school are basically non-existent. In fact at the Junior High school, each class has a class leader. This is a student who has been appointed as the class manager: he or she will stand up and tell the class to calm down if they are getting too loud, will call out a student who is not trying hard enough, or will approach the teacher about students who are struggling. It takes a little while to wrap your head around for a teacher who isn't used to it, but so far, the system has worked really well!

The students seem pretty happy to have "Mr. B and Miss Rieu" (our noms de guerre as it were) as their teachers. Mr. B even recieved a tetra pack of milk from one of his students after he casually mentioned that his wife was having a difficult time finding milk that she liked!

Jinshitan roundabout