Rocks in they Chinese Heads, Marbles in they Mouths..

Play along.. you'll like it!

It is "midterm" time. Midterm time is the only chance we have to grade our students on how good their English is. We do this by sitting down, one-on-one with each student, and asking them between 4 and 8 questions.

Which I do to my class of Chinese students. This is a bit complicated in this class, as I have 36 Chinese, one Korean, and one Vietnamese student in this class. I am told that makes 38, in total. And I have 180 minutes to test them all. Which is slightly less than 5 minutes per student. So I extend my class hours (undoubtedly against the rules) and fit them all in and await the kind of communication nightmares that will ensue.

In the event, I discover that most of them speak quite decent English. They are Sophmores, so they've had a year of college-level English, and many of them also had some quite good training back in China. I had some startling conversations (and suspect the Guoanbu is now after me) and all this makes me ask myself the question, why won't the Tibet-Oppressing, girl-baby exposing, commie abortionists talk in class?

I need to ponder on this, since I'm sure this kind of issue will pop up again...

oh well.. for now it's off to find the copy boy....