Luke Writes

It was a few days after Lunar New Year and Charles and I were on the 88th floor observation deck of what at that time was Shanghai’s tallest building–the Jin Mao tower. It was warm and sunny on the observation deck, and our sleeves were rolled up – a novelty after three months of freezing [...]

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For teachers considering working in China choosing a school can be a frustrating (and daunting) task. Private language schools have a reputation for being rip-off artists, and horror stories about them are easy to find. Even public schools have their fair share of horror stories.
Because of this it can be a sort of nervous, ulcer-inducing [...]

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That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.
-A. Whitney Brown
As anyone who has learned a second language can attest, one of the biggest hurdles you come across is humor. Plays on words require a linguistic understanding that is hard to achieve from just listening to your Pimsleur [...]

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At the Changchun Foreign Language School my classroom was a listening lab. It was a difficult room to teach in since the kids were all locked away behind glass partitions and had computers to play.
Anyway, as I learned to use the (all-in-Chinese) computer software, I spent lots of time listening to conversations that I wasn’t interested in, such [...]

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