Just planned the last Dragons lecture with Nick. We wanted to do something reflective. Here’s what we came up with:

We’ll start off with a dictation and then read through the text to correct pronunciation, as usual.

Next we’re going to listen to “You’ll Be In My Heart” from Tarzan. Don’t worry, we’re not that sappy and we didn’t quite think of this randomly. Actually we thought it would be fun to do mad libs with the students, and when we were browsing mad libs online, we came across a “You’ll Be In My Heart” mad lib and realized it would be a nice song to introduce to the students. I hadn’t listened to it in a while, but I was quickly reminded that it is a fantastic song. Here are my favorite lines:

I know we’re different but,
deep inside us
we’re not that different at all

The Chinese textbooks at Princeton tend to focus on the differences between the US and China. Last summer at Princeton in Beijing, one of the first sentences we learned was “Chinese people like to shower at night; Americans like to shower in the morning”. Back at Princeton in 3rd year Chinese, our discussions continued to contrast China and the US. We covered differences in spending habits, attitudes towards dating, sex and marriage, attitudes towards education, child-rearing and how to care for parents in old age.

Having been thinking in dichotomies for such a long time, I came to China this summer and saw differences everywhere. And let’s not kid ourselves; they are everywhere. But over the last few weeks in Jishou, I’ve become aware that there are so many similarities between Chinese and American students. We’re sarcastic. We like to make fun of each other. We like to eat. We like to sing. We have dreams and insecurities. We like to talk about relationships (this is perhaps the students’ favorite topic). I’ve seen the dynamics of their friend groups, and I could totally fit in as a student here.

Back to tomorrow’s lesson. We’ll continue with a mad lib version of the song (the students will replace words in the song with words of their own choosing, not knowing where they’ll go). Should be fun.

Last, we’ve planned a 30 minute reflective free-write. The writing will address address expectations coming into PiJ, how the experience compared to expectations, and thoughts about the future. I plan to write along with the students. Then we’ll spend the first hour of precept discussing what we wrote, and the second hour playing King’s Cup (one of the student’s favorite games). Can’t wait to hear what the students have to say and to tell them some of the things I’ve been thinking about.