Yesterday I finished my last class with my faculty group. This group got smaller as the term went on, but after week it seemed to hold steady. We gave out certificates of completion at the last class; pictures of these were posted on WeChat. I gave out some Writer's block chocolate, and they gave me a SJTU pen/ flash drive/ mouse ensemble in blue and black and white. The pen, I think, is porcelain. Quite lovely.
Here are the faculty-students as I photographed them yesterday.
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| Huang Cheng from the Antai College of Economics and Management Huang Cheng is showing her syllabus to the class. |
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| Cece Ma, Coordinator for the program. She was always there when I needed help. She set up Sakai, a very easy to use platform, which took no training. | | . |
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| Wang Yuxing (George) Department of Physics and Astronomy |
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| Tang Zongming (Joyce) Antai College of Economics and Management Zongming has provded transportation the last few weeks from Minhang to Xuhui in her beautiful new BMW. |
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| Zou Futai School of Information Security Engineering. He's a runner and works out regularly. He's working on a paper in English entitled "Detecting Malware Based on DNA Graph Mining." |
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| Yu Jiying (Liz) School of Foreign Languages (teaches English) is working on a study involving adding critical thinking to the English writing courses she teaches. |
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| Lu Yuanwu School of Foreign Language (teaches English) |
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| Lu Yuanwu's daughter came to class with her. |
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| Zhao Huiyu (Joy) KoGuan Law School |
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| Yu Hongyan (Summer) School of Physical Eduction wants to write a paper that provides a history of physical education testing in China from 1954 to the present |
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| Here's George again. (Wang Yuxing) |
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| Yu Jiying is telling the class about her critical thinking project and her search for an appropriate rubric. |
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After class we went to a nearby restaurant, where, according to my students, the deans would eat lunch and often dinner every day. Cece ordered a great dinner.
Thank you to these very serious faculty members, who were committed to improving their English during the middle of a very busy term.
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You've seen some of these people before; they were the first group on this page.
Meet my class of staff people, many of them administrators or teaching assistants who represent the university in their daily work with educational partners in Europe and America. One of the students was gone for several weeks, attending a conference in Belgium. Two others were sent to Taiwan for a conference; they are members of the teaching and learning center setting up conferences, leading workshops on improving teaching. As you can see, to call them students is a misnomer, but they have indeed been working hard to improve their English. They are all incredibly busy and incredibly intelligent. Here they are pictured giving a speech on their last day of class, June 11. Several spoke on improving working conditions including concerns with second-hand smoke and chemical pollution in the chemistry building, the need for flexible working hours for young parents, upgrading computer systems, hiring teacher aides. Others spoke on administrative needs such as increasing beginning salaries to attract foreign teachers, adding staff in order to better promote programs and attract graduate students and faculty, proposing a plan to retain a high level of recruiting despite a large cut to the recruiting budget, and, of course, creating a plan to change mandatory overtime to one that includes compensation and an approval process. The people talked for up to 10 minutes, a third of them prepared Power Points even though I said not to because I was afraid they would just read the Power Points, but those who created Power Points were creative and effective. And they spoke without reading. I am very proud of how well they did, how clearly they spoke, how well organized their speeches were, and how much they must have practiced.
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| LILY 2 Feng Zhaoying |
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| BRUCE Wang Yang |
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| Yang Leejiong |
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| LILY 1 Li Yi |
ROBIN Chen Bing
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| SANDY Nie Yiingyu |
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| LUCY Zhang Laofang |
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| Jack Liu Gang |
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| Xing Lei |
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| Liang Zhumei |
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| NANCY Zhang Lihui |
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| SUSAN Si Qiyang |
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| JOHN Xu Honglie |
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| LILLIAN Liu Yan |
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| JENNY Liu Chejuan |
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| JUDY Zhu Xiaolan |
SHERRY Ya Xue
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Thursday, 7.5.14, Lu Yuanwen, who attends my Thursday Faculty session asked if I would talk to her class, which meets at the end of my session. She sent her teaching assistant, a very interesting young medical student who is doing research at the Children's Hospital in Pudong. He injects human stem cells into the testes of mice or rats. It was never completely clear to me what the predicted results of the experiment might be. He is the tall person standing in the photos below.
Here are members of the English class that Lu Yuanwen teaches.
The class was active. The young man above asked the first question: How can we create a situation where we can speak English 100% of the time? A long discussion followed. One young lady said she has a visiting student from Taiwan, where her university has an English hour every day. Maybe someone will carry the idea forward.
Other questions centered around writing with complexity and not having to write on simplistic topics. They were complaining that they had to write five paragraph essays. I believe they are using Langdon, but they should be using something that enables them to express the true quality of their thinking.
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I've had a lot of contact with students since being here. I've got two ongoing workshops, and while these "students" aren't exactly that, there have been three or four other classes of undergraduate and graduate students, and a one-meeting workshop with faculty and a two-meeting workshop with staff people.
The most fun I've had has been visiting Ding Yaping's poetry class and He Yan's poetry class. I've been to Ding's three times (I think) and one to He Yan's. And then once when they combined their classes So in these classes I got to discuss figurative language and meter (sound and sense), and had them go through the prewriting process of drafting a first version of their own poem. When they turned their poems in, we went over them and I did a little editing to show what the poems could become. I 'll post some of them when I get copies.
At one meeting I read a copy of my poems, and one of the students, Yang Junjie had a poem he had written in Chinese to read too. In the minutes before class, he wrote a quick translation. He seems to be a stereotypical poet type, with a Chinese twist. That is, he doesn't get his assignments done or is late on everything he does finish, a little lackadaisical and maybe spacey when it comes to home work, and seems to love being in the moment. He does come to class, and he's also good natured and easy going, and doesn't seem to have any addictive habits. He knew he had to give me a translation but waited until he got to class to write it. Maybe this is being a typical nineteen-year-old, but he seems cheerful.
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Here's the double-sized class; Junjie is on the left in the second row, in the white plaid long-sleeve shirt. Yes, he doesn't have long hair.
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The following are pictures from the two-meeting staff workshop on May 13 and 20
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| Recognize this young man? LiYi (Kevin) |
This was a great group of people. They are all very sweet and sincere.
And almost all of them are working on or already have and advanced degree.
Several wrote about working toward their master's degrees and at least one wrote about working
toward a doctorate
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EVERY WEDNESDAY I meet a group of delightful people. They work hard, turn in assignments, accept criticism, even ask for it. They are a group of staff people who have some pretty important positions at the school. Since I figured they were writing memos and emails and letters to many English speaking clients, I've been giving them business letter assignments. Yep, in an earlier version of myself, I used to teach a business communications course. At one time, I was even a communications specialist in the army reserve. I could write all those jargon laden promotion and duty reassignment letters,but that was in an even earlier version of myself
I plan to take more pictures. I missed the faces of a few people This is a typical breakout session where they have just finished drafting a message and now are sharing with each other.
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