Teaching has taken over my life . . . but that's the way it's supposed to be. I teach Listening to first-year students (3 classes), British and American Culture to second-year students (4 classes), and Newspaper Reading to adult students (1 class). If I overlook the fact that they all happen to be Chinese, my students differ very little from the ones in New Paltz . . . especially the first-years. There are gaggles of girls in their flare-leg jeans and trendy pastel tops, and athletic boys rough-housing in the corridors. The punk rocker glides along on his heels, dressed in black from top to toe, while the lonely misfit has tucked his unbecoming brown shirt into his ill-fitting pants. The class of '09 has arrived! I asked my first-years what famous person they would like to meet; the response ranged from the predictable (Yao Ming) to the inexplicable (Dante). George W. Bush and Chairman Mao shared about equal popularity.

I'm reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie to the first-years, chapter by chapter. I thought that the experience of pioneers in the American west would strike a chord with them, here in the western frontier of China, and I was right. In the culture class, we're about to exit pre-history, reluctantly. Yesterday they wrote pictographic stories as if they were cave artists -- great stuff! The newpaper class was a little grumpy today -- I bumped them up to the New York Times from the USAToday-like China Daily. They'll get over it (I hope)!

The students' English is very limited, but they are all bright and open to my freewheeling teaching style, the likes of which some of them have never encountered. Teaching with nothing but my wits and a grubby chalkboard is, likewise, quite an education for me. There are NO projected media (overhead, video, powerpoint), and I can duplicate handouts only if I send them to the printing department in advance, whereupon the students will be billed for the printing. I've opted out of that system. I print out a few images (Stonehenge, covered wagon, etc.) from my computer to pass from hand to hand in class, and I create tiny handouts, twelve to a page, print them out and cut them up. The students don't feel slighted -- they don't have any paper, either. If I give an assignment that takes less than a page to complete, they hand in the sheet torn in half and save the rest for another day.

There's a chill in the air here in Lanzhou; all the stores are displaying winter clothes, now. I'm glad to settle in for the long haul. We have week of holiday following National Day at the end of next week; an American friend and I are staying in Lanzhou to explore it more thoroughly. I'm looking forward to seeing the summit of Lanshan, our venerable local peak, but I think I'll take the chair lift and leave the climb to the youthful!