Should be working, but I’ll blog instead.

My first week of classes has reached its end and I’ve made some stunning discoveries. I realized that I basically have very little idea as to what I’m doing. I mean, I know I’m a native English speaker and that should be enough to teach these students, but the University has asked me to teach them English Writing. And although I think of myself as a writer, albeit not a great one, my grasp of sentence structure and other basic grammar rules is so ingrained into my thinking process that it’s a challenge to describe how it’s done. I do not think in terms of subject placement, predicate, and verb agreement when I create a sentence, it’s more natural than that. I think about what I want to say, and I say it, like second nature. Teaching English Writing to foreign language speakers is nearly impossible because I don’t think about sentence structure and other components of grammar. It compels me to stop and think about every sentence I read and write. It’s like learning graphic design; I’ve always just looked at newspapers and magazines without noticing design elements such as balance and contrast, but once I became familiar with these elements and how they work to attract a viewer, I couldn’t help by notice these elements in every piece of literature I looked at. Once in a while, when I make a mistake while writing, I know, instinctively, that something is wrong, but I don’t necessarily know what is wrong, or why. This teaching experience requires that I re-familiarize myself with the process of creating a coherent sentence, a process that escaped my mind years ago.

Relearning this process has brought some realizations, as I mentioned above, but it has also brought a joy in discovering grammar all over again. Sounds a little bizarre doesn’t it? Grammar…fun? It’s true, it can be fun because it has the potential to revolutionize the way I think about writing, and the way I read. I’ve discovered that many of my sentences are too complex for their own good; they often are incomplete or don’t make sense. When I read philosophy books, I am awed by the sentence structure that is used to articulate complex ideas. Realizing that such ideas are multifaceted, I no longer try to understand the whole without understanding the parts, but rather, the realization has forced me to adopt a more pragmatic approach to dissecting a complex sentence into its core parts in order to understand it as a complete expression of an idea. Unfortunately, I only have one philosophy book at the moment, and it’s a philosophical approach to the art of writing by Norman Mailer, an excellent wind-bag of a writer, if I do say so myself, but my desire to read more literature in this genre has intensified. I like having to think hard, and although the sentences themselves are complex, this type of writing succeeds in delivering the writer’s ideas through its clarity and exactitude-both important to the understanding of a philosophical concept.

Additionally, this rediscovered interest in grammar has forced me to seek alternative ways of learning and teaching the subject of writing, including an almost forgotten program that has taught generations of people English grammar, American politics and history, Science and Mathematics: School House Rock!

And with the marvelous technology we have today, this beloved cartoon series is available at my fingertips via YouTube!

And who could forget:

I hope these songs will be stuck in your head for a while.

Another website that is proving to be a useful tool in learning how to express grammar rules and teach English writing is The Purdue Online Writing Lab. “OWL” is an indispensable resource for brushing up on adjectives and adverbs, style and formats, and provides many exercises and quizzes for use in English as a second language classrooms; all free of charge (thanks Purdue!).

My first lesson was informal and basic. I began the class by introducing myself, where I’m from, why I’m here, what I want to do with my life, and what I like to do for fun. Then I asked the students to do the same. One by one, the students in each class shared their short biographies with the rest of us and most of them demonstrated proficient English speaking skills. Every student in all four classes had a chance to tell me a little about themselves in a way that hopefully encouraged them to become familiar and comfortable with me—after all, I’m going to be their teacher for the next 16 weeks!

Then I asked them to answers some questions about writing. I asked them to write their thoughts down without regard for trying to give me the “right” answer. I asked questions such as, “Why do people write?,” “Who writes?,” and “What types of writing do you read, and what purpose do they have?” I think some of the students may have been a little confused, but I assured them that I was not interested in grading their answers, and whatever they could come up with was what I was looking for. I wanted to get the students to think about writing in broader terms than just newspapers or literature, I wanted them to think about writing as an essential function of human creativity and communication. I hope it worked.

Then I asked the students to write a description of their favorite food, including describing its taste, texture, color and preparation. I know that many non-native English speakers struggle with vocabulary, and I’ve noticed that, when discussing food, many Chinese people are limited to describing everything as “delicious.” I hoped to help them realize a few things: first, not all food is delicious, and second, there are many ways to describe good food in English. The exercise also helped me think about my favorite foods and forced me to come up with ways to describe them. I picked two foods to talk about after they were finished: tofu and cranberries. I picked these two because they are two of my favorite types of food, and because I knew they would be familiar with one and not the other. The exercise allowed us to discuss words like, “soft, spongy, absorbent, red, crimson, taupe, tart, sour, firm, and so on.” I hope they got as much out of it as I did.

Next week we’ll be discussing manuscript form and rhetorical devices; I may have to spend some extra time on the latter.

Other stuff

The second installment of my bi-weekly column in the Advocate was published on Thursday. You can read it here.

I’m planning a trip to Inner Mongolia during the first week of October (if possible). There are a few things that I’m waiting to hear about before I finalize the plans, including a possible trip to Hong Kong during that week. But I think Inner Mongolia would be a pretty rad place to visit; I miss seeing stars and that is one of the best places to see them on Earth.

My tennis game is improving thanks to daily workouts with Teacher Jiang, the 86-year-old man with perfect form and consistency. The guy gives me a workout every time we play, keeping me on my toes and forcing me to step up my game. His gentle character, kindness, patience and physical endurance amazes me. I hope to be like him someday.

That is all for now, two days of rain has ended and cooler air beckons me to go outside. More to come later.