What's in the town: a small park, a lake, numerous delicious hole-in-the-wall eating establishments, 6 or 7 middle schools, several family-run shops, 2 supermarkets, several hair salons, three bus stations, and a few hospitals

What's nearby: The city of Yueyang is one hour away

Occupations that people hold: farmers, teachers, shop owners, sales people and cooks

Number of teachers overall, number of English teachers: 260 teachers, 26 English teachers

Number and grade/ability level of students: Junior One (US 7th grade), Junior Two (US 8th grade), Junior Grade Three (US 9th grade), Senior Grade One (US 10th grade), Senior Grade Two (US 11th grade), Senior Grade Three (US 12th grade)

Daily schedule: Mon- 3 classes from 9-12, Tues- 4 classes from 8-12, Wed-2 classes from 8-10, Thurs-2 classes from 8-10, Fri-2 classes from 9-11

Semester or cycle schedule: Semester begins in late August, 4 day holiday in October, semester ends in late Jan with a month-long holiday, week-long holiday in the beginning of May, semester ends in late June

Supervision:  Vice Principal Ma decides my schedule. Everything I do goes through him. My supervisor is Mr. Yi, the head of the Senior Two English Department.

House/room: My apartment has a computer with internet access. When the town is not rationing out water, I can get it hot. I also have electricity when it's not being rationed out, but rationing is very common during the winter.

How close you are to the school and other important locations in town: I live on the school campus and I am about a 5 min bus ride from the town center.

Level of the language when you arrived: I had zero Chinese language ability-unable to even say ni hao.

How you are doing partway through your stay: I have a working, survival knowledge of the language. I cannot have any deep intellectual discourse, but I am able to have basic conversations and get by without any problems. Traveling helps out a lot with learning the langauge. I have been here for 9 months.

The winter was very hard, b/c there was no indoor heating. So it was nearly impossible to get warm. I like being warm, so that was very difficult.

The best part of this experience is now knowing that I can get along independently pretty much anywhere and have a great time doing it.

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Chaling Number One Middle School, by Gabriel Carroll

I've tried to be diligent about the way my classes are run and to fulfill the few concrete requests the school administration makes of me. My makeshift approach to class planning has been to go along four main lines simultaneously: (1) following textbooks so that I can reinforce what students learn in their regular classes; (2) games, songs, and such stuff that students enjoy and can help make them interested in English; (3) easy dialogue-type stuff to get students to be comfortable talking in English, without too much concern about whether or not the content is new; (4) pronunciation.

In the fall, my Senior 1 class time was spent mostly having students give presentations, on any topic they saw fit. This was partly to give me a way to grade the students, and partly to give everyone some practice speaking (#3 above). This effort was more successful than I expected. In the first week, lots of students hadn't prepared anything, but after their classmates saw that I still called their names and expected them to come up and improvise something, most people prepared for subsequent weeks. I gave each student brief written feedback. My remaining class time was mostly spent on fun stuff (Categories was a popular game, and for a song I did "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" which was just the right level) and a couple pronunciation exercises. I didn't use the S1 textbook at all because it's way beyond the students' ability level.

My fall Junior 1 classes were a scramble of activities, each of which was 15 to 30 minutes in duration. I did several oral exercises that followed the textbook, some pronunciation exercises with minimal sets, and a couple random fun activities. I'd say that the textbook-based activities were the most successful from the point of view of student participation, and probably also from the point of view of educational value, since they covered material that got reinforced elsewhere. Unfortunately, I don't have enough class time to cover all chapters of the textbook, especially if I want to do other things too. I also tried some grammar exercises, which students found deathly boring. At the end of the semester, I had students perform skits, which some of them did quite enthusiastically and successfully, while many others refused to participate, or failed to prepare and then came up and stood around awkwardly when I called their names.

In the spring, I've followed the "scramble of various activities" approach with both my J1 and J2 classes. I was specifically asked by the administration to work more on pronunciation, and several students have asked for a thorough overview of the IPA, so I've been spending a lot of time going through each symbol individually, with tongue shapes, minimal pairs, and so on. The results are doubtful: I can get most students to pronounce most symbols correctly when specifically demanded, but not to remember how to pronounce an entire word a day later. Only a handful of students actually put in effort to learn to pronounce words correctly when it's not specifically demanded of them. I've kept up the occasional textbook-review activities in both grade levels, and also had them do some random simple dialogues to practice talking in sentences, which has been relatively successful.

One of the most successful activities in terms of participation was actually proposed by a J1 student: she helped me prepare a handout with a bunch of sentences in Chinese, reviewing material from throughout the semester, which I then called on students to translate into English orally. I do a few games and songs in those classes whose discipline level permits me to get through the other activities, and they're usually well-received. To make sure each student talks (and to have something to grade them on), I've had them prepare final projects, and this time given them a choice of putting together skits, doing individual speeches, or taking oral exams. These things are in progress right now, and they're more organized than last semester's (since I was better-prepared this time), but still less than ideal. Most of the students participate, some enthusiastically, but a large minority simply refuses to say anything. Then again, that's comparable to the proportion of students who get failing scores on a typical final exam in any other subject.

Greatest Challenges

If I had to start the whole year over with the same set of students, I'd do a few things differently. I'd throw grades out the window and basically run a candy class. I'd much rather run a genuinely educational class, but that requires reinforcement of material outside of my 13 hours per semester of class time in order for retention to happen, and it also requires a way to get students to stay quiet when they need to pay attention. This apparatus doesn't much seem to be there, and consequently most students are bored during class and forget most of what I cover. Even if I wanted to play games all day, though, the range of activities available is admittedly limited, since students here speak English at a J1 level regardless of what grade they're in.

Although my view of my classes is pretty negative, I should mention that I have one amazing class, a J1 class. They're quiet when I talk; they control each other; they do their homework; they sit patiently through the boring activities and participate enthusiastically in the fun ones; they don't waste time and get through all the activities that I prepare; they learn fast and are probably more advanced in English by now than any of my J2 classes. Many of them come visit during my office hours (see below). They are the already in their seats before the bell rings and are happy when I walk into the classroom - and so am I. If all my classes were like class 25, I would think seriously about staying here another year. But, they're not.

I've also had evening self-study duty at various times. During the fall, my weekly self-study sessions increased from zero to six over the course of the semester. However, students rarely came up to ask questions. Mostly I spent the time just trying to regulate the noise level and otherwise reading or grading papers. For most of this semester, I've had just two sessions per week: one with a J2 class, that's also fairly inactive, and one with class 25 (see previous paragraph), where I have students constantly bringing up questions. Many of my students know I'm a math major, and they sometimes ask me math questions (in Chinese), which I'm happy to help them with, as long as I'm able to understand the question. The math problems they give students here are way harder than what American students get.

Greatest Rewards

So that's it for my in-class teaching experience. I also have independently put together, or been involved in, a number of extracurricular activities, for both teachers and students. The success of these activities has varied but on the whole I think they're more useful than the time spent in class.

One thing I've done has been to hold "office hours," designated time at lunch or in the evenings where I hang out in a meeting room and students can freely visit and chat. Some students come to practice English; some come to ask English questions (or even math questions); some talk to me in Chinese and ask questions about life in America and about my experience living in a foreign environment. Those who come are mostly students I teach, but I've had a few students from other grade levels visit as well. Last semester, I found that the presence of senior students tended to scare away Junior 1 visitors, so this semester I've dedicated part of the time for each grade level (as well as some time that's open to everyone). Once in a while I sit around and nobody comes by, but most days there are at least a couple students who come visit. I haven't made a lot of effort to make the sessions structured - usually I expect students to bring their own topics - but sometimes I bring over games, maps, photos, or other trinkets and leave them on the table to provide a default conversation topic. It's hard to gauge the concrete educational impact of my doing something like this, but clearly students enjoy it and so do I.

This spring, I also started putting together a collection of English books for interested students and teachers to borrow, since there's basically nothing available in our school library or bookstores around town. I made available the few books I brought with me, and ordered a bunch of cheap items from Amazon, which my parents helped ship over (and they added a few donations of their own). The bulk of the books arrived by mail just last week. (In fact, it was mainly this event that held up my writing of the present email, since I wanted to see what kind of reception the books got before making a report.) The collection isn't huge - about 25 books, ranging from Green Eggs and Ham to Catch-22 to The World Almanac 2005, plus a couple random magazines and newspapers - but it's gotten a respectable amount of interest. There are few students who can read much of anything, as obstacles to comprehension spring up all over the place ("What is 'Sam I Am'? Isn't that grammar wrong?"), so thus far I think I've done the right thing by ordering just a small quantity of materials. So far I've been managing the collection myself, just having people sign up when they borrow stuff so I can keep track of where it is. I expect I can leave it with the school library when I depart.

I've also started putting together a binder of miscellaneous English-learning materials for students to browse casually – things like websites, lists of common mistakes, descriptions of simple games, tongue-twisters, and so forth, with the idea that a student asking "how can I learn English?" can pick it up, flip through, and get some new ideas within a couple minutes. To date, this hasn't really gone anywhere, since I haven't had much time to spend on it and have also been unsure how to adequately advertise it.

This semester I've also been running a weekly English corner for interested teachers. At first participation was lethargic – about three or four people attending. Since the school instituted a new attendance policy that required teachers to be on campus most of the day, participation has increased a little. It's gotten to be reasonably successful; the teachers who attend now seem noticeably more comfortable talking to me (and to each other) in English than before. I hope someone will have the initiative to continue organizing this thing next year, especially if there isn't another foreign teacher around.

I've also tried to put together a weekly cultural discussion series, at which a few interested teachers would talk in Chinese about prepared topics relating to cultural and social differences. The talks went on for a few weeks and sort of fizzled out, perhaps partly because my language difficulties made the sessions too awkward, partly because it wasn't possible to find a time that was convenient for everyone, and partly because of disagreement about the topics – people here wanted to know about popular music and TV, which I don't know much about, and I wanted to know about politics and economics, which they don't know much about.

Our English department has meetings every other Wednesday, mandatory for anyone who doesn't have classes at that time. Last semester I was conveniently given classes that barred me from attending, but this semester I've been able to go. A couple times I've been asked to provide topics for an English corner in which all teachers are expected to participate. This produces more awkward silence than conversation, since most people are there only because it's obligatory and don't want to say anything. Some faculty members have suggested instead that I give some lectures in English. Several supported the idea of me giving a mathematics talk, so I'm currently working on preparing that and expect to deliver the talk either next week or two weeks later.

I've also been involved in the usual array of miscellaneous events that I guess foreign teachers get asked to take part in: sometimes I'd be asked to visit a class during their weekly "class meeting" period and answer students' random questions, either in English or in Chinese depending on the grade level; sometimes I'd be asked to judge an atrociously boring English speech or song contest. I helped my liaison correct and grade a bunch of theses that English teachers around the county had to write as part of some training requirement. As the year has gone on and students and I have become more familiar, I've sometimes visited classrooms on weekends, to hang out and chat or play games. I've found that chess (the international kind) is pretty popular, but unfortunately there's no place in Chaling to buy a chess set.

I've served one more purpose from the point of view of our school leaders: they like to hold me up for other teachers as a model of responsibility, diligence, and generosity. I may possess these qualities in some degree, but since I'm unmarried, am not burdened with head teacher or grade director responsibilities, live on campus, am paid more generously than almost anyone here, and don't have to provide for poor or sick parents, I think it's a little unfair to ask everyone to be as committed as I am alleged to be.

I feel that the English corners and office hours have been relatively successful activities, and indeed that my usefulness would be vastly increased if I didn't have to run any seventy-kid classes and could instead just run English corners with small groups of interested people for forty or fifty hours a week. I still basically feel that I currently have too little time with any individual person to have a lasting impact on anyone. At least I can hope that people here in the future can pick up on some of the ideas I've delivered, like the English corners and the supply of English books, and continue to develop them and make them available to the Chaling #1 community.

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 Ningyuan Number One Middle School (Yi Zhong), by Dan Olver