First day of school at Anshun Teacher's College. We each had one class today. The morning bell went off this morning at 6:30 getting everyone up. It goes off for thirty minutes and is quite loud. We went to get our visa made into a foreign expert residence card at the police station, which was an interesting experience (they thought we were brother and sister). We returned in time for our 10:00 class. Patty was teaching Oral English (28 students) and I had a English Listening class (37 students). It was really fun to be in front of students again, though there are a few differences between teaching in China and the States. In China, we have a monitor (student in our class) who takes care of the teacher by getting the door unlocked, preparing the classroom, taking attendance, making sure everything is right, and also keeping contact between students and the teacher (concerns or complaints). My students came from all throughout China, with some coming as far as 60 hours by train. Students in China also stay in the same classroom for all four years of college with the same classmates and the teachers are the ones who switch classrooms.

It was really fun getting to meet so many new students from different places. We look forward to getting to know them better. Just like in the states, most of the English education majors are female--I had 6 males out of 37. This will be a more difficult job of remembering names as many of them have less common English names. The freshman have not moved to campus yet. They will near the end of the month, so I have only four more classes this week and Patty has three. We have been doing some planning and are excited to start learning Chinese from our tutor Claire. We have been meeting lots of new people and trying lots of new things and trying to retain as much as we can for when we go to do things in town. We hope that all is going well for you--we definitely miss many of the things of home, but are adjusting to everything but the language pretty quickly.