Tempest7: Blogger

A New Class - The House Wives

Today is one of those days in which nothing really seemed to go right.

I taught a new class this morning, one of the most difficult I have ever tried to teach. Actually I wasn't told which location I was suppose to go to and one of my bosses had to meet me at the MTR station to lead me to the new school. We are getting along well actually since he likes to learn English from me. The previous teacher finally contacted me that morning to tell me where he had left off in the class. Of course the information was wrong which I soon found out.

Stepping into the class I came face to face with 13 house wives out to learn English. Maybe I'm easily embarassed in front of girls, but there is something that makes me nervous when I am facing a class full of females. Biggest challenge this time around, is I am teaching business English and they really know very little English. They are use to a chinese instructor who can speak both Cantonese and English fluently.

The circulation is poor in the front and I was sweating right away standing up there. The worst thing happened was one lady got pissed off and within the first 10 minutes stood up and left. That was a bit unnerving I've never had that happen before, but later on I found out she gets pissed off easily and apparently she uses a hearing aid. I was a bit confused at first because she sat just two seats away from me, except she kept asking me to speak up. The people in the back rows could already hear me clearly. Some how I managed to make it through the day, speaking 90% Cantonese. My vocabulary was stretched to its limit today, exposing just how weak I was. The class was helpful though, and somewhat playful. The common questions people have for me are, "where do you come from?", "how old are you?", "do you have a girl friend?" There was some laughter after the last question. Apparently the lady who was asking me has a 13 year old daughter. They were forgiving this time, but clearly next time I need to be more prepared. I'm somewhat at a loss because describing business English completely in Chinese is very hard for me.

I went for my appointment today at the immigration office. Also a failure, apparently I forgot to request my parent's Marriage Certificate and it was not included in the care package. They need this for sure so they could not process my request today. I've rebooked my appointment again for the 9th of Sept. Hopefully I can convince my parents to send it via courier. This simply has been a painful experience trying to get my Hong Kong ID. But, I need it badly so that I can legally work here.

Back at work I had a new student who has been skipping classes. Actually several of my students seem to have disappeared, but a core group still exists and they are quite devoted to learning English from me. The students have opened up to me a lot and have presented several possibilities to me. I have one student from mainland who has also been in Hong Kong about 3 months now. She is very keen on learning English and has been looking into electronic dictionaries. I too have started to look into them since I need the help. The problem though is the good ones can be expensive. My student asked me to accompany her today to test out a new machine (the VLearning 7600) before she decided to buy it. The machine is pretty amazing, able to read out loud plenty of English words and being able to think and translate whole sentences. The majority of the translations are pretty good as well. They are not perfect, and sound funny in an offical capacity but most of the time you can guess the meaning. The question is, is this good enough, as a translator I am impressed that for the majority of sentences the translations are fairly close. But it seems you can not learn to speak languages from it. I might consider buying something like it though since the translations are fairly good and I have a need to have a dictionary around. My classes don't exactly pay enough to justify it though.

They treated me out for dinner afterwards and we talked shop regarding computers. There is the possibility that one of them wants me to do some network design work for her work place. This is hopefully where social networking pays off. Design work can be a big boast for my line of work and the pay must be a lot better than what I am getting now. Hopefully I can capitalize on my new found social network to improve my lifestyle in Hong Kong. At the same time, I hope I can give back to them so that they can improve their English.

posted by Tempest7 @ 00:49