Saturday, July 17, 2004
THERE ARE STUDENTS, AND THEN THERE ARE STUDENTS
See photos about this week's posting in the Yahoo photo album. (Will open in a new browser window.)
Since February, we’ve acquired 3 private students, all in their mid-20s, university graduates, with jobs in Huairou, who want to improve their English. We meet on Wednesday and Friday nights for 2 hours, having general conversations and then practicing the lessons in one of Li Yang’s many text books (see our earlier posting on the famous Li Yang). We decided before we accepted any of these young people that we wouldn’t charge them for the lessons -- we don’t need the money and they bring us much enjoyment and other advantages. Often, someone arrives with fresh strawberries or nuts, or we all go out for dinner together as their way of saying thank you. We recently learned that the going rate for a native English speaker to teach English privately is anywhere from 50 to 100 yuan an hour -- that’s a lot of cash for these young people to spend!
Luo Jing Xin (about to have his 23rd birthday) was the first to ask if we would help him improve his English. He had had little contact with Westerners, and has since told us that he had great hesitation in calling us. He’s a graduate of the Hangzhou Mass Communications University, a very exclusive school which accepts a limited number of students each year. The city of Hangzhou is south of Shanghai on the coast of the East China Sea. When Jing Xin first came to see us he was a TV announcer at the Huairou TV station. He has since moved on to be the videographer on news items of importance and interest in the area. By the time he finishes this internship, he’ll have experience in all areas of TV work. He was glad to give up the announcing post because now he can grow a beard and wear his hair differently. However, the other night he arrived without his beard, telling us that he had to announce as well as record news items, and so he had to shave the beard. He’s a very personable young man who has many ambitions for his future. Most of all, he wants to continue with his education, and has asked if we would help him make arrangements for him to study in Canada -- possibly at Ryerson University in Toronto. His ambition is to be a TV/film producer. We’re quite happy to give him both financial and moral support. This has given him greater confidence in his ability to do well. Generally, Chinese students of any age lack self-confidence.
Jing Xin’s hometown is Harbin, in the northern province of Heilongjiang, not all that far from Vladivostok. Harbin is the province’s capital, and is famous for its winter festival, in the same league as the winter carnival held in Quebec City each year. His parents are in their mid 50s, his father an engineer specializing in train design, and now the administrator for two factories in Harbin. His mother is a retired businesswoman. They were in Huairou a few weeks ago, and we had the chance to meet them both -charming people, who are thrilled that we have taken an interest in their son. Jing Xin’s father is currently having some serious medical problems, a great worry for their son, who is very caring and understandably concerned.
In the past month, Jing Xin has taken special weekend courses to further improve his English, in preparation for taking the TOEFL, a language test required by Canadian universities for foreign students. He’s a very quick study, and especially enjoys learning English idioms. Last week he met two Americans while filming a news item, and he told one of them that he was as American as apple pie. This came as a great surprise to the American visitor! When the construction curtain was being removed from the new building at the school recently, a process which took almost a week, Judy told him that the building was doing a striptease. He loved this word.
Along with our other students, Jing Xin is often at our apartment for dinner or lunch - he’s very tall and we say he has a hollow leg because he can eat prodigious amounts of food without gaining an ounce. All our students do dishes -- we have trouble getting into the kitchen after a meal because they are so busy cleaning up.
The next student to join us was Li Hui Jia, whom readers to this site will remember from the article we wrote about the Foton Truck Factory, where she works. Judy found Li Hui Jia waiting one day outside a classroom in the halls of Huairou Yi Zhong. She wanted to maintain her level of English and didn’t have an opportunity to practice at work or with her friends, who speak no English. Judy said she would ask Ken about taking on another student, and they agreed that it might be interesting to have two students, who could share their experiences and talk with each other in English. We also asked Jing Xin if he minded another person joining him before Judy called Hui Jia to say welcome to the group. Her English is very very good, and we’ve had no difficulty at all in working with her. She also has helped the others meet her standards, which of course, has improved their own pronunciation and range of vocabulary.
Hui Jia, born in 1981, is from Tangshan in Hubei province. Much of the Yantze River runs through this province, and the Three Gorges dam site in here. Tangshan was the centre of a devastating earthquake in 1976 which killed many people. Subsequently the city has been rebuilt and is now a very modern metropolis. Her parents still live there, where her father is a doctor and her mother a teacher. She graduated from Yanshan University where she specialized in mechanical engineering. In her third year she studied French, but was unable to complete this course because SARS intervened, closing the university for several weeks. Many disruptions occurred at this time all over China, and we often hear people speak of the “SARS Period” as a separate and distinct time which affected their lives.
Hui Jia went directly to work at the Auman-Foton Plant here in Huairou, where she is quite optimistic about the possibilities of increasing her language skills, especially German because of the joint venture being planned between her employer and Benz. In the future, she wants to “achieve my worth”. For her, the ideal position would be the manager of a department. She also wants to further her education, wishing to study German and French, as well as English, “the languages of the developed countries”, so that she can work as a translator with her company. Like Jing Xin, she lives in a dorm on the factory site, sharing a room with several of her workmates. The site is so large that it takes her 20 minutes to walk to the office where she works.
About a month ago, Hui Jia wrote a special test at her factory. The successful candidates, Hui Jia among them, are now studying English for a 6-month period at the Foreign Culture Exchange University in Beijing. She dropped in to see us last week, arriving with a large melon and a bag of fresh lichees, full of enthusiasm about her new life in a university dorm, where she has a room to herself -an unheard of luxury!
Sun Tian Yu is a physics teacher at our school, and our Chinese teacher, Xu Ke, brought him along a few months ago because he too wants to improve his English language skills. They are very good friends, having begun their teaching careers at HRYZ at the same time. They are constantly joking with each other, and act very much like brother and sister. Tian Yu is very intelligent, and has caught up to the level of spoken English of Jing Xin and Hui Jia in a relatively short time. He has a very charming sense of humour, and constantly says things which keep us all smiling. He’s a very dedicated teacher who loves his job. This year he has taken on the added responsibility of being the headmaster of one of the Senior 2 classes. This means that he’s with them almost constantly, beginning at 6:30 and ending after evening classes at 22:00. He monitors their behaviour, listens to their problems, feeds them if they have no money for food, checks on their academic progress and anything else that can happen in a class of 52 teenagers.
Tian Yu was born and raised in Qiqihar (chee chee har), the second largest city in the northern province of Heilongjiang, the same province Jing Xin is from. His father is an accountant who has recently moved to Beijing because of his job. Tian Yu visits him quite often in BJ. His Mom continues to live in Qiqihar. He has a 21-year old sister who goes to university in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province, whose southern border is shared with North Korea. Tian Yu went to Harbin Normal University for 4 years, majoring in physics. His job at HRYZ is his first teaching position; he’s been here for 3 years. His dedication to teaching is quite evident in any conversation on this subject. He glows when talking about physics, his students and his job. Both his grandfather and an uncle were in education, so it’s somewhat of a family tradition. His ambition is to become a famous teacher. What more can we say?
In September, both he and Xu Ke (Jerri) will be teaching Senior 3 students, and in fact, begin their “summer classes” with their students on Saturday, July 17. This will be a strenuous year for them both, with classes every Saturday from now on. And in the spring term, classes every day. The rest of the students don’t begin classes until September.
And finally, our Chinese teacher Xu Ke (Jerri), decided soon after Jing Xin arrived, that she also wanted to attend our evening classes. Because she teaches English at HRYZ, she is sort of the coach of the group, catching them up when they mispronounce a word or phrase. She has a very large vocabulary and an excellent command of English, and we think she just wanted to be part of the fun --- and she also wanted to meet Jing Xin, who is a local celebrity because he’s on TV every day…and a bit of a dish at 6’2”, thin, very handsome and totally unaffected by all this. At 26, she’s a very energetic person who loves sports, and often has bruises and scrapes from playing basketball and badminton with her students. She and Ken were in the same office all year, and she was a big help in explaining what was going on in the daily routine.
Before going off to university, she had lived in Anshan, Liaoning province, another northern resident. Anshan is known as the steel capital of China; however, now the entire region is in economic decline, and just recently, the Chinese government has announced a wide-ranging plan to revitalize the three northern industrial provinces (Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjian). Xu Ke went off to Luoyang Technological Institute in Henan province for 4 years of study in commercial English. Luoyang is one of the ancient capitals of China where many important archaeological finds have been made.
We met Xu Ke’s Mom the other day, here for a visit with her daughter. Xu Ke and Tian Yu both live in the dorms provided by the school for unmarried teachers. Her Mom was able to move into her daughter’s room, because her former roommate had been married a few months ago. This visit means that Xu Ke doesn’t need to make the 12 hour train ride to Anshan in order to see her relatives. And her mother will have a holiday in the ‘south’ while she visits her daughter.
Xu Ke is also interested in coming to Canada to further her studies in education. She’s keen to work at the university level, or with the Department of Education to train teachers. We hope to be able to help her reach her goals. At present, she’s considering OISE or the Althouse College at UWO.
Over our time here, we’ve come to know some of Keyan’s Senior 3 students, and want to mention two of them here. Lyn and Cecil are very good friends from very different backgrounds. Lyn lives with his family in a farm village about 30 minutes from HR. His family grows corn, apricots and chestnuts. They somehow support Lyn’s older sister and now Lyn in their university studies. Lyn has just learned that he’s been accepted by his first choice university. Cecil is a city boy, the son of an administrator with the HR Education Department and a Mom who works at home. He achieved one of the highest scores in his class, and has been accepted at the best foreign language university in BJ, where he is enrolled in the German program.
The two boys often come to visit us and we have English conversations while drinking tea or coffee. These visits can last for a few hours, and we often have to hint that it’s time for them to go home. It’s a convention which doesn’t seem to exist in China.
Since they’ve finished their exams and had the results, they’ve both invited us to visit their homes. We’ve had a very interesting time meeting their families and getting some idea of how their lives work.
We feel that we’ve been very fortunate to have such interesting and energetic private students. They’ve filled in many empty spaces in our lives here. We will miss them. But with email and promises to keep in touch, we’re sure that we’ll be able to follow their careers as they progress to new fields of study in the months and years ahead. As far as teaching them goes, it was a pleasure, as our Chinese students would say. We have received as much, and more, as we have given. They are no longer students, but our friends in China.
See photos about this week's posting in the Yahoo photo album. (Will open in a new browser window.)
Since February, we’ve acquired 3 private students, all in their mid-20s, university graduates, with jobs in Huairou, who want to improve their English. We meet on Wednesday and Friday nights for 2 hours, having general conversations and then practicing the lessons in one of Li Yang’s many text books (see our earlier posting on the famous Li Yang). We decided before we accepted any of these young people that we wouldn’t charge them for the lessons -- we don’t need the money and they bring us much enjoyment and other advantages. Often, someone arrives with fresh strawberries or nuts, or we all go out for dinner together as their way of saying thank you. We recently learned that the going rate for a native English speaker to teach English privately is anywhere from 50 to 100 yuan an hour -- that’s a lot of cash for these young people to spend!
Luo Jing Xin (about to have his 23rd birthday) was the first to ask if we would help him improve his English. He had had little contact with Westerners, and has since told us that he had great hesitation in calling us. He’s a graduate of the Hangzhou Mass Communications University, a very exclusive school which accepts a limited number of students each year. The city of Hangzhou is south of Shanghai on the coast of the East China Sea. When Jing Xin first came to see us he was a TV announcer at the Huairou TV station. He has since moved on to be the videographer on news items of importance and interest in the area. By the time he finishes this internship, he’ll have experience in all areas of TV work. He was glad to give up the announcing post because now he can grow a beard and wear his hair differently. However, the other night he arrived without his beard, telling us that he had to announce as well as record news items, and so he had to shave the beard. He’s a very personable young man who has many ambitions for his future. Most of all, he wants to continue with his education, and has asked if we would help him make arrangements for him to study in Canada -- possibly at Ryerson University in Toronto. His ambition is to be a TV/film producer. We’re quite happy to give him both financial and moral support. This has given him greater confidence in his ability to do well. Generally, Chinese students of any age lack self-confidence.
Jing Xin’s hometown is Harbin, in the northern province of Heilongjiang, not all that far from Vladivostok. Harbin is the province’s capital, and is famous for its winter festival, in the same league as the winter carnival held in Quebec City each year. His parents are in their mid 50s, his father an engineer specializing in train design, and now the administrator for two factories in Harbin. His mother is a retired businesswoman. They were in Huairou a few weeks ago, and we had the chance to meet them both -charming people, who are thrilled that we have taken an interest in their son. Jing Xin’s father is currently having some serious medical problems, a great worry for their son, who is very caring and understandably concerned.
In the past month, Jing Xin has taken special weekend courses to further improve his English, in preparation for taking the TOEFL, a language test required by Canadian universities for foreign students. He’s a very quick study, and especially enjoys learning English idioms. Last week he met two Americans while filming a news item, and he told one of them that he was as American as apple pie. This came as a great surprise to the American visitor! When the construction curtain was being removed from the new building at the school recently, a process which took almost a week, Judy told him that the building was doing a striptease. He loved this word.
Along with our other students, Jing Xin is often at our apartment for dinner or lunch - he’s very tall and we say he has a hollow leg because he can eat prodigious amounts of food without gaining an ounce. All our students do dishes -- we have trouble getting into the kitchen after a meal because they are so busy cleaning up.
The next student to join us was Li Hui Jia, whom readers to this site will remember from the article we wrote about the Foton Truck Factory, where she works. Judy found Li Hui Jia waiting one day outside a classroom in the halls of Huairou Yi Zhong. She wanted to maintain her level of English and didn’t have an opportunity to practice at work or with her friends, who speak no English. Judy said she would ask Ken about taking on another student, and they agreed that it might be interesting to have two students, who could share their experiences and talk with each other in English. We also asked Jing Xin if he minded another person joining him before Judy called Hui Jia to say welcome to the group. Her English is very very good, and we’ve had no difficulty at all in working with her. She also has helped the others meet her standards, which of course, has improved their own pronunciation and range of vocabulary.
Hui Jia, born in 1981, is from Tangshan in Hubei province. Much of the Yantze River runs through this province, and the Three Gorges dam site in here. Tangshan was the centre of a devastating earthquake in 1976 which killed many people. Subsequently the city has been rebuilt and is now a very modern metropolis. Her parents still live there, where her father is a doctor and her mother a teacher. She graduated from Yanshan University where she specialized in mechanical engineering. In her third year she studied French, but was unable to complete this course because SARS intervened, closing the university for several weeks. Many disruptions occurred at this time all over China, and we often hear people speak of the “SARS Period” as a separate and distinct time which affected their lives.
Hui Jia went directly to work at the Auman-Foton Plant here in Huairou, where she is quite optimistic about the possibilities of increasing her language skills, especially German because of the joint venture being planned between her employer and Benz. In the future, she wants to “achieve my worth”. For her, the ideal position would be the manager of a department. She also wants to further her education, wishing to study German and French, as well as English, “the languages of the developed countries”, so that she can work as a translator with her company. Like Jing Xin, she lives in a dorm on the factory site, sharing a room with several of her workmates. The site is so large that it takes her 20 minutes to walk to the office where she works.
About a month ago, Hui Jia wrote a special test at her factory. The successful candidates, Hui Jia among them, are now studying English for a 6-month period at the Foreign Culture Exchange University in Beijing. She dropped in to see us last week, arriving with a large melon and a bag of fresh lichees, full of enthusiasm about her new life in a university dorm, where she has a room to herself -an unheard of luxury!
Sun Tian Yu is a physics teacher at our school, and our Chinese teacher, Xu Ke, brought him along a few months ago because he too wants to improve his English language skills. They are very good friends, having begun their teaching careers at HRYZ at the same time. They are constantly joking with each other, and act very much like brother and sister. Tian Yu is very intelligent, and has caught up to the level of spoken English of Jing Xin and Hui Jia in a relatively short time. He has a very charming sense of humour, and constantly says things which keep us all smiling. He’s a very dedicated teacher who loves his job. This year he has taken on the added responsibility of being the headmaster of one of the Senior 2 classes. This means that he’s with them almost constantly, beginning at 6:30 and ending after evening classes at 22:00. He monitors their behaviour, listens to their problems, feeds them if they have no money for food, checks on their academic progress and anything else that can happen in a class of 52 teenagers.
Tian Yu was born and raised in Qiqihar (chee chee har), the second largest city in the northern province of Heilongjiang, the same province Jing Xin is from. His father is an accountant who has recently moved to Beijing because of his job. Tian Yu visits him quite often in BJ. His Mom continues to live in Qiqihar. He has a 21-year old sister who goes to university in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province, whose southern border is shared with North Korea. Tian Yu went to Harbin Normal University for 4 years, majoring in physics. His job at HRYZ is his first teaching position; he’s been here for 3 years. His dedication to teaching is quite evident in any conversation on this subject. He glows when talking about physics, his students and his job. Both his grandfather and an uncle were in education, so it’s somewhat of a family tradition. His ambition is to become a famous teacher. What more can we say?
In September, both he and Xu Ke (Jerri) will be teaching Senior 3 students, and in fact, begin their “summer classes” with their students on Saturday, July 17. This will be a strenuous year for them both, with classes every Saturday from now on. And in the spring term, classes every day. The rest of the students don’t begin classes until September.
And finally, our Chinese teacher Xu Ke (Jerri), decided soon after Jing Xin arrived, that she also wanted to attend our evening classes. Because she teaches English at HRYZ, she is sort of the coach of the group, catching them up when they mispronounce a word or phrase. She has a very large vocabulary and an excellent command of English, and we think she just wanted to be part of the fun --- and she also wanted to meet Jing Xin, who is a local celebrity because he’s on TV every day…and a bit of a dish at 6’2”, thin, very handsome and totally unaffected by all this. At 26, she’s a very energetic person who loves sports, and often has bruises and scrapes from playing basketball and badminton with her students. She and Ken were in the same office all year, and she was a big help in explaining what was going on in the daily routine.
Before going off to university, she had lived in Anshan, Liaoning province, another northern resident. Anshan is known as the steel capital of China; however, now the entire region is in economic decline, and just recently, the Chinese government has announced a wide-ranging plan to revitalize the three northern industrial provinces (Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjian). Xu Ke went off to Luoyang Technological Institute in Henan province for 4 years of study in commercial English. Luoyang is one of the ancient capitals of China where many important archaeological finds have been made.
We met Xu Ke’s Mom the other day, here for a visit with her daughter. Xu Ke and Tian Yu both live in the dorms provided by the school for unmarried teachers. Her Mom was able to move into her daughter’s room, because her former roommate had been married a few months ago. This visit means that Xu Ke doesn’t need to make the 12 hour train ride to Anshan in order to see her relatives. And her mother will have a holiday in the ‘south’ while she visits her daughter.
Xu Ke is also interested in coming to Canada to further her studies in education. She’s keen to work at the university level, or with the Department of Education to train teachers. We hope to be able to help her reach her goals. At present, she’s considering OISE or the Althouse College at UWO.
Over our time here, we’ve come to know some of Keyan’s Senior 3 students, and want to mention two of them here. Lyn and Cecil are very good friends from very different backgrounds. Lyn lives with his family in a farm village about 30 minutes from HR. His family grows corn, apricots and chestnuts. They somehow support Lyn’s older sister and now Lyn in their university studies. Lyn has just learned that he’s been accepted by his first choice university. Cecil is a city boy, the son of an administrator with the HR Education Department and a Mom who works at home. He achieved one of the highest scores in his class, and has been accepted at the best foreign language university in BJ, where he is enrolled in the German program.
The two boys often come to visit us and we have English conversations while drinking tea or coffee. These visits can last for a few hours, and we often have to hint that it’s time for them to go home. It’s a convention which doesn’t seem to exist in China.
Since they’ve finished their exams and had the results, they’ve both invited us to visit their homes. We’ve had a very interesting time meeting their families and getting some idea of how their lives work.
We feel that we’ve been very fortunate to have such interesting and energetic private students. They’ve filled in many empty spaces in our lives here. We will miss them. But with email and promises to keep in touch, we’re sure that we’ll be able to follow their careers as they progress to new fields of study in the months and years ahead. As far as teaching them goes, it was a pleasure, as our Chinese students would say. We have received as much, and more, as we have given. They are no longer students, but our friends in China.
All text and photography © copyright Harkaway, 2003 - 2004
