LukeWrites.com

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 in Changchun.

Apart from offering amazing views of the Yalu river and some of Shanghai’s concessions, the Skywalk observation deck has a number of its own kitschy attractions: the highest post office in the world, a vertigo-inducing windows through the ceiling of the Grand Hyatt’s atrium, one of Yao Ming’s shoes.

The windows in front of the elevators gave the best view of the Bund, and like every other elevator full of tourists we’d gone directly from the elevator to them.

So there we were. Clear sky, a view of Shanghai as far as the eye could see, sunlight reflecting off the Yalu river. A family with a little boy came over to look out the window with us and as soon as they were next to us at the windows the boy pointed and shouted, “Look at how hairy (毛子) that foreigner’s arms are!”

We all had a good laugh at how hairy I am and I kept my sleeves rolled up. If I’d been able to speak better Chinese I’d have said, “If you like my arms you’ll love my back.” But I didn’t know the vocabulary.

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 experience to find a “good” school–here are some tips (things I did and wish I’d done) to ease the process.

1. Talk to as many foreigners at the school as you can. Ideally the school will have a foreign manager or someone else who serves as a liaison between the foreign faculty and the Chinese staff/administration. Talk to that person to get a feel for what the school’s like.
Ask for e-mail addresses of teachers that are currently employed by the school. If they’re not willing to let you talk to current employees, stay away. [Read more →]

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 CD’s, and different cultures have different ideas of what is funny.

Cursing usually is the same as humor…

You end up learning them over time, just like you learn idioms and manners.
(Cursing usually is the same as humor in terms of being something that has to be learned–what’s vulgar in one language may not be in another.
Richard Francis Burton, who spoke twenty-nine languages, claimed that he always leaned a language’s curses and obscenities first, so to best understand its nuances.)

[Read more →]

I’ve started putting up games and teaching materials for English teachers on my TESL/TESOL game site. I’ve been updating it with games, activities, and teaching materials that I’ve found success (and enjoyed) using in my classes.

Updates there come much more frequently than they do there, so check it out if you’re a teacher.