First faculty meeting and Mongolian Hot Pot

Teresa

I had my first faculty meeting today at 10:30am.  (So exciting to get to use the f-word!)  I guess I was a little anxious about it because I couldn't sleep last night.  Just like the night before the first day of school when I was a kid.  Finally got up and took some Valerian root, but even then it was a struggle.  The meeting went well though and I learned a lot.  I'm teaching two classes this semester - Introduction to University English; and Interaction and Basic Skills.  Both are meant to help students improve their English and prepare for the rigors of the University setting.  This meeting was for the first one, which is a Level 2 class and the students are at Intermediate Level.  So to give you a sense of what that means, our course objectives include things like:

• reading texts and passages of up to 800 words
• summarizing texts, which may include an author's viewpoint
• written tasks of up to 350 words; including summary and response, supported opinions, and documented reports with supporting citations and evidence
• speed reading
• differentiating between main ideas and details

Janice

There is no textbook for this class, but Teresa and Janice, the teachers who created the curriculum, have done a great job of putting together a course that is communicative, relevant and utilizes technology.  I'm very excited about it.  I'll be teaching this class twice a week for an hour and a half.  The Level 0 class, Basic Skills, meets 4 days a week for the same time period.  So I'll have 9 hours of teaching time and 6 scheduled office hours.  Plus all the prep and grading of course, but it seems like a good workload to me. 

The course materials they provided are wonderful, and I greatly appreciate having some structure in place to guide me.  (Many of my classmates in the Bay Area have not been so lucky.)  As I mentioned, the head teachers picked topics relevant to the students as well.  The first unit is on stress and time management.  One of the activities provided examples of different ways that people manage their stress and stay healthy.  The activity looked great, but one of the examples was totally disturbing.  The Pretend Person Pillow.  Have you heard of this?  It's like a body and arm you can snuggle up to if you feel lonely.  Creepy!!!  Talk about asking for nightmares.  Unless it comes complete with chest hair, I don't think it's gonna work for me.

I don't have a good picture of my office yet, but I'll try to remember to take one.  If you want to see more photos of the school, I'm providing two links below, one for the main University website and one for the ELC.

U Macau Photo Tour: http://www.umac.mo/tour.html

English Language Center: http://www.umac.mo/elc/index.html

After my meeting I ran some errands and wandered a bit, then my housemates and I went out for dinner with Miranda, a new teacher at UM who lives in our 'hood.   She's a Macau native, so she knows all the good spots.  We went to Fat Little Sheep, a Mongolian Hot Pot restaurant.  YUM!

Basically it works like this, there's a burner built into the middle of your table, and they bring a pot of broth and spices to set on it.  Then they bring you plates of raw food and you toss stuff in and then fish it out again when you think it's done.  Delicious!  Luckily Miranda filled out the ordering card for us and again I used my cheating technique and copied down all the stuff we got on a second form so I can go back.  This is the veggie plate - the white things are noodles, below that are various types of greens, to the left of that black mushrooms and blocks of tofu, above it thin sheets of fried tofu and at the bottom, lotus root.  All very, very good.  There were also several plates of thinly sliced frozen raw meat.  They kept filling up our tea pot and we kept chatting and trying to clean off the plates.  After four hours we threw up the surrender flag and went home. 

But don't worry Fatty Lamb, we'll be back to fight again!

Angie and Miranda

Beth and I