Blog

All good things...

19/6/2023

My career at the Yunnan University of Finance and Economics (YUFE) is coming to an end this week. I now just have a hundred Final Exam Essays to mark and my time there is over!

It's been largely a very enjoyable 8 years at YUFE. I originally joined so that my schedule would allow me to take JD to and from school each day, and to be around at weekends (something I couldn't do in my previous job at Robert's School of Languages). But it turned out to be a good move anyway, with long holidays and plenty pf time in the week to do private lessons which have more than made up for the pay drop.

The courses have become progressively easier to teach over the years, as I collected resources and learned how to use some awful textbooks. The support staff have been consistently helpful and pleasant, if a little clueless at times! The number of foreign teachers in my Department started at 6, gradually dipped to just me, and more recently has been 2-3. I shall miss the place as I move on to a new chapter of my life.

I say, I say, essay...

30/4/2023

I've spent most of this week marking my students' mid-term exam essays. For every half-decent one there is another which barely makes any sense at all. Each one takes me about five minutes to mark and so, overall, we are talking many hours of mind-numbing work!

The most commonly mis-spelled word?
"DESTROY" ...usually written as DESTORY!

FLTRP - ETIC

1/11/2022

For yet another year, I've been one of the judges of the Provincial English Speaking Competition. This time I was determined to find out what "FLTRP - ETIC" actually stands for!

None of the other judges seemed to know either, so we checked online and finally found out that the actual name of the event is... "Foreign Language Training & Research Press - English Talent Identification Competition Cup". Succinct, right?

Cloud and clear

7/9/2022

China continues to be very paranoid about COVID. So, when two positive cases were discovered in Kunming (pop: 7 million) last week, the local government started mass testing here and my university decided to begin the Summer term online.

The software we use for this is ideal if your lesson is basically a one-way lecture (favoured by most Chinese teachers), but fairly useless if you are supposed to be teaching Speaking or Debate (ie me!). There are no real-time, face-to-face options in the program and the only feedback from students is anonymous comments which roll across the screen! The "cloud" above shows the most common comments in my class yesterday. At least there's some laughter in there. We are told that after two weeks we should be able to return to the classrooms. Here's hoping...

Cheats never prosper

9/6/2022

My term finished today after a week and a half of exams. As usual, some of the students tried their luck at cheating - such as this tiny essay hidden under a student's desk, spotted by me within two minutes of the exam starting. In the past I reported this sort of thing to the University authorities. They reluctantly made the students concerned take a resit exam the following term (which I was told they "had" to pass). And this meant me having to write a whole new exam for just a couple of lazy miscreants. So these days I just dispose of the cheating evidence and make the student continue to write the essay unaided. A lot less hassle for everyone. So now, after I've marked about 150, holidays beckon.

In a word...

15/4/2022

It's that time of year again when the students spend an hour of their time writing me a mid-term essay under exam conditions, after which I have to spend 4-5 hours per class marking them all.

One of the most infuriating errors (despite me explaining it to the students again and again) is when they write, "In a word,..." followed by lots and lots of words!

Online again

7/3/2022

I was just about to leave for work at the University yesterday when a text message came through saying, "Do NOT come to YUFE. All lessons this week are to be conducted online".

There was no immediate explanation, but later I heard that a student in another University in Kunming had tested positive for COVID and so all Kunming Universities had to close for 3-4 days.
This presented me with some problems:

(1) My afternoon lessons were meant to be students doing "debating",
(2) I don't have the software used by the students for online work,
(3) The first lesson was in one hour's time.

So I switched the content to a different - less interactive - lesson, tried to access the relevant software but, after an hour of technical issues, gave up on that and finally sent materials and work tasks to the classes directly to complete by themselves. Not sure how things will play out for the rest of the week....

Judge dread

19/10/2021

I was asked yesterday to be one of five judges at the first round of the latest English Speaking Competition.

I've done this before and sat through 30-40 videos of variable quality. But today there turned out to be 140 videos and the whole thing took 3½ hours! And unlike previous years none of the contestants was particularly outstanding. All very average. Oh well.

Seal the deal

13/10/2021

Lessons at my Uni have started up again after the "Golden Week" holiday. This is one of my classes trying to rearrange the lyrics to the song "Love's Divine", sung by Seal, after I had cut and mixed up the words.

Running the class

17/9/2021

My University lessons are back in full swing after an unusually long, but very welcome, two month Summer holiday. This was one of my classes earlier this week doing a "Running Dictation" exercise...

The Chinese Government have been rolling out a series of education reforms over recent months to "reduce the burden" on young students in China. These include banning online tutoring with teachers based abroad, removal of western printed textbooks, regulating after-school and weekend training classes and reducing homework and exams in Primary Schools. However, JD's school seem to be largely ignoring the "less work" parts. Completing his daily homework is taking longer than ever. He didn't finish until after after 10pm on Monday/Tuesday, though Wednesday/Thursday were "only" 8.30pm [see below]. Crazy.

Very international meeting

25/6/2021

I was asked (well, told!) to attend a meeting the other day between my University (YUFE) leaders and the foreigners who work and study there. The attendees represented 16 countries in all - mostly Asian and African. I'm the second-longest serving foreigner there (6 years so far), but was still introduced as "Mr Paul"!?

The meeting lasted over two hours and was mostly spent listening to self-congratulatory speeches commemorating 100 years of the Chinese Communist Party and 70 years since YUFE's founding. Gripping stuff. Not.

Flip-flop flood

7/6/2021

The rainy season finally started last night and, despite many thousands spent on their sewage infrastructure in recent years, my University has the usual flooding. My students waded to class today in their flip-flops!

Flying fish?

9/5/2021

It's that time of year again when I have to wade through hundreds of essays and try not to be too negative about the mangled English therein. Some students show small signs of improvement while others fail to understand the most basic of instructions ("400 words, not 207"! "5 paragraphs, not 7 or 2!"). Others just leave me bewildered....

Examburger and chips

15/12/2020

Final exams this week have consisted of "Restaurant Role Plays", "Business Company Presentations" and "Job Interviews". I find the girls are usually hard-working and well-prepared while the boys often seem "less bothered" about their grades!

The biggest problem with the Powerpoint Presentations (despite it being highlighted and warned about every week for a month or more beforehand) is the use of writing which is unclear, too wordy and too small...

Your listening

25/10/2020

I've been involved in the annual Provincial English Speaking Contest again over the last couple of weeks. The first round involved viewing and marking 64 x 3-minute videos then later a live Semi-Final with the 32 best. The Final next week will be for another foreign teacher to do. I've done my bit! The theme this year was "2020 - a year of challenges". Most focused on COVID-19 and China's impressive response to the pandemic. Few mentioned where it originated from...

The most common error was ending the speech with, "Thank you for your listening". But the one that made me chuckle the most was the contestant who declared, "All countries must unite - we need to change the word". And the word was indeed changed!

Tweaked week

1/10/2020

Unusually this year, Chinese National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival fall on the same day, so there is a full week of holiday throughout China. Apart, that is, from my University where we have just have one day off! They blame COVID, and promise we'll get an extra week in the Winter holiday. But I'm suspicious ...all the other Universities and schools in Kunming have got a full week. Mean!

Class of '20

9/9/2020

My University started up again this week. I've seen five new classes so far, with two more to follow in a week or two. Class sizes are about 20-30, which is a lot better than some previous classes of 50-60.

Mingle Activity

After some begging from me, all my lessons have been squeezed into Monday to Wednesday. This allows me to do IELTS examining on Thursdays and Fridays ...except that British Council have suddenly changed their examining days to Monday to Wednesday. Just my luck!

All present and correct, sir

9/7/2020

My academic year ended yesterday with a week of exams - essays and presentations, depending on the class subject. It's been a strange term, starting with online activities and moving to face-to-face classes about a month ago. Hopefully things will return to some form of normality when the next term starts again in September.

3000 years?

19/6/2020

It seems one of my students is somewhat older than I thought!

Trad grad

5/6/2020

I was asked to represent the faculty yesterday at my University's 2020 Graduation Ceremony. All very traditional.

Mask do better

29/5/2020

I've finally finished my first week back at my University doing face-to-face lessons. And I've I managed to overcome all the various hurdles associated with that such as;

Getting to 7.40am classes on time despite dropping JD off at his school at 7.20am, some 10km away.
Passing temperature checks when entering the University AND every new office or building within it.
Teaching speaking lessons while wearing a mask with 40+ students also all wearing masks.

The students handed in their first proper essays this week. About half were acceptable - the rest had seemingly listened to nothing I've been banging on about online over the last two months. The simplest thing like "having FIVE paragraphs" seems beyond some of them!! Ho-hum!!

It's hard enough distinguishing students at the best of times, but now...?

Back hordes and blackboards

25/5/2020

This week sees the return of in-class lessons at my pretty University.

I've been teaching online for two months with mixed success (the internet in China, especially in the countryside where many of my students live, is variable at best). But the students have now flown, trained and bussed back from around the country.

As ever, there are a raft of bizarre contradictions in the University decisions. Foreign teachers living in Kunming start teaching this week but local Chinese teachers started last week. Classrooms are sterilized between lessons but toilets still have no soap or hot water and students must sit at least a metre apart, but classes of 50+ would need students to hover near the ceiling to achieve that!

ClassZoomRoom

14/4/2020

Like many people these days, my job now involves hosting Zoom sessions. In my case, this is with a few dozen University students at a time, spread across China. It's hard enough to get them to talk face-to-face in a classroom but, when they have various technical excuses at their fingertips, "classes" can end up with an awful lot of silence!

Food for thought

3/1/2020

My term ended yesterday. I print out the students' grades, but then have to copy them freehand onto another a blank sheet before finally handing them in. Someone else then takes the handwritten score sheets and manually inputs them back into a University computer! This crazy process is so inefficient and has such a high potential for typos, it beggars belief! And yet no one (but me) seems willing to question it.

The Final exam for most of my classes was to prepare a 3-person role-play set in a restaurant. There were the usual grades for fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation and content, but also for props and acting. Some did well, some tried to cheat (as ever) and some were largely incomprehensible. But everyone who turned up passed - this is China!

U who

19/12/2019

"Find someone who..." activity at University.
Last lesson of the term. Exams next week.