TEFL Time

Excellent news:  The other Yale-China first year Fellows have descended upon Hong Kong!  I am so happy to have them here, just to add a new spark to things.  I'm excited about having guests who have never been to Hong Kong before, so I can show off the city, and I am totally falling back into Tour Guide mode.  It's probably really obnoxious, but I'm enjoying it nonetheless!  We've started slow, taking them to Shatin, the nearby shopping metropolis, to go for Western food and go to City Super, our equivalent of Whole Foods.  It made me grin when everyone was running around picking out cheese, chocolate, and fresh fruit, as it was basically a mirror image of how I looked when I first arrived in Hong Kong and realized I would have so much familiar food all around me.  

We've begun teacher training, so I am two days closer to being qualified to teach at CUHK (as baffling as I find this fact sometimes).  While we're learning some really interesting techniques and methods of teaching English as a foreign language, much of it won't be applicable in my class because our students will already have a very high working knowledge of English, so we won't be doing a ton of pronunciation and grammar work (hopefully).  That being said, we will still absolutely have our work cut out for us!  For example, one of the units we'll be teaching in English 1330 (the 3rd course in a 3-part series for English majors) is on business English, so we're going over proper e-mail and phone etiquette, which is something that I, a native English speaker, still struggle with - I often get flustered when writing e-mails to important people, then err on the side of informal and funny, only to realize in a second reading (after it's been sent) that I sound like a doofus.  So I guess we'll just be learning this valuable skill together.  We actually were able to do a sample lesson plan for this very assignment today, however, and it did not seem so daunting anymore.  

Tonight our homework was to read about reading, and then write about reading - which I need to go finish up now.  This class is very meta.  

I like having a job.