Today was our second day working at No. 1 Middle/High school in Luxi. It was another busy day working with the children and LAC. When all the guys were up, we went to the cafeteria to have breakfast as usual. For two days I saw Eric running to the supermarket to buy something, which just triggered my curiosity. Eric went to buy milk tea every day, which he loved when he lived back in Asia before he went to UMich, and now he could enjoy this Asian heritage. Breakfast was the same as usual, so we have different kinds of buns (meat, sugar, pickeledvegetables, and red beans) to choose from. However, today the soy machine at the breakfast place went down, so we ate/drank some porridge with the buns. After breakfast, we took a picture with an M-flag as we all work Michigan t-shirts.
We started our English lessons at 8:30 AM. Today’s topics were Occupations and Education. As I was coordinating all of the courses before the trip, I felt that this section was the most unprepared of all the sections. However, after yesterday night’s discussion and everyone’s hard work, it turned out to be a great class. We introduced different occupations by describing what each one does, and the students proved their intelligence – they understood most everything. Then we asked them to describe each occupation in their own words so they could practice speaking. Next, we played charades – we had 5 groups of students and we asked one student from the class to act out an occupation and one person from each group to guess what occupation what the occupation was. The kids loved this fame and it became really competitive.
After a short break, we started to talk about education. After teaching them necessary vocabulary, we started to tell them about the differences between the education systems in the United States and in China. Students were very active in this part and to my surprise, they knew a lot about the education system. We specifically talked about the college application process in the US and some of the students were even going to apply to US schools, which really impressed us. So we decided to give them a brief intro to UMich. We showed them many pictures of our beautiful UMich including the Law Library, Law Quad, Ross, the Diag, Fletcher Library, Angell Hall and our excellent School of Engineering. Students were amazed byUMich and hopefully some of them could become future wolverines!
Lunch was the same as usual. After lunch we all went to our different mini project teams. Today I took a leave from my drama team and went with Nikki’s sociology survey group to see how things were going. I was really glad to see Nikki played a great leadership role in the group and successfully broke the cultural/language gap with the students. We went to all five different bookstores in the town. Before every time a students started to ask a question, they would show the question to Nikki to make sure the questions were OK and Nikki gave them good advice on how to make a good survey and interviews. On the way they chatted about different topics including “Gossip Girls” and other general stuff. I was glad to see Nikki really became part of the group and experienced a lot about locals in China. Also, she used her talent to help the students.
This was pretty much the fifth day for the VA China team, we worked hard again in the evening on our next day’s lesson plan and we look forward to working with the children again tomorrow.
Go EGL and go blue!
-Chen
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