A Chinese Halloween

Happy Halloween to all! As you all prepare for an evening of vampires, ghosts, ninjas, zombies, X-men, and the occasional Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, we wanted to let you know that we celebrated Halloween in style ourselves!

Every year, the foreign English teachers put on a Halloween party for all the Freshman English students. We learned that this party has become one of the most anticipated events of the entire school year for students. As one of our veteran teammates told us, "Your students will literally talk about this one party for their entire college career after they have gone to it." In fact, it is so popular that we have to print off non-duplicatable tickets so that only our Freshman students can get in. Apparently, in the past, students from all departments in the school try to get in and it becomes unmanageable for the teachers.

We spent the entire week preparing for the party by purchasing so much candy at the supermarket that we received the "crazy stares" from passing customers. We planned out the layout of the party, and had our LAs (library assistants) and several sophomore and junior volunteers help us for it. We were given 3 large classrooms to use for the party. 1 classroom became a haunted maze which I (David) worked the whole night. Another classroom was the craft room where we had face painting, jack-o-lantern drawing, and ghost crafting done which Anna worked. The final room was our game room where we had "eye ball" toss (a bunch of white ping pong balls we turned into eye balls), a bat ring toss, and musical chairs.

The previous week's freshmen class that we had was a lesson on Halloween in order to teach them a little about the holiday beforehand and to get them more excited about the party. It wasn't difficult to get them excited. They pretty much did that all on their own. In fact, when Anna passed out the tickets to one of her classes, one of the boys in the class stood up and kissed the ticket. We also made as much emphasis as week could for them to come in costumes (which many of them did to our delight).

I have to admit, there is something quite rewarding about being able to scare the living daylights out of freshmen students in a haunted house one week and give them a test the next, haha!

As per the rumors of past parties, this one received as much mention as we had expected. After the party was over, WeChat (their version of Facebook) exploded with posts and pictures from the Halloween party. We also possibly took more pictures in this one evening than any other time I can recall.

We are definitely looking forward to doing this again next year. We hope that you all have a happy and sugar-induced Halloween there too!

Minnie Mouse and her beat up soccer beau.

Our teammate, Travis, came as a mummy, or as one student perceived.....an astronaut.

Anna with a portion of one of her classes. The student on the right is the one who kissed his ticket when he received it.

One of our fellow teacher's sons. Ironically, he really wanted the Captain America symbol and Anna delivered.

As soon as David started posing with scary faces, no student wanted him to smile for any picture.

Students lined up to take pictures with us. Felt a little bit like we were characters in the Magic Kingdom (which is funny considering Anna was Minne Mouse).

Another of Anna's classes there for the party!

Anna received a lot of gifts from students. This was a stuffed animal dog that is shaped so that you hug it in the middle of its body. Chinese refer to these as "boyfriend gifts". Thankfully it wasn't a boy that gave it to her.

Anna taught one of our LAs to facepaint too.

Students crammed into the craft room.

Musical chairs.

The director of the English Department came with her son. He came dressed as a wizard.

Several teachers came with their children. It felt like we were hosting a China Fall Festival at times!

One of the Chinese English teachers went all out in her Snow White outfit!

Two of our students took us to dinner the night after the party. This is a style of cooking in the Northeast called "dun" which means "stew". The center of the table is a wood-burning fire which heats the cast iron pot in the middle and you each right out of it. Might be the best food we've had in China yet!

Grace for the transition

We are so sorry it has been a while updating you on the blog recently! As October arrived, our routine has become more concrete and predictable. To be honest, we missed this. It’s amazing how one can have such a love/hate relationship with daily routine, but through this transition we craved it and are so thankful for a new routine here in our new home.

Classes are going really well! We cannot begin to tell you how much we love our jobs here. There are days when they are trying…maybe a lesson plan doesn’t go how we thought, a student acts up and becomes disinterested, or we are thrown a curve ball and have to adjust on the fly (this happen A LOT in our context). Yet again and again we are humbled and overwhelmed with this amazing opportunity. Our classes are an hour and forty minutes long, with a ten minute break somewhere along the way. David teaches sophomore writing, sophomore oral, and freshman oral. I teach freshman oral, sophomore oral, and junior speech. Because our company has had a team here on this campus for some 30+ years, our team has progressively created our own curriculum we use in the classes. This is SO helpful to have a backbone for the lessons, and significantly reduces our time spent lesson planning. What’s also nice is there are three of us foreign teachers teaching any given class. So when we lesson plan, we meet together once a week for a brief time and go over what we are thinking or planning on doing for next week’s class. This is a luxury I know many teams within our company do not have so we are super grateful. David teaches 14 hours a week and I teach 16 hours a week. This leaves a great amount of time spent hanging out or meeting with students- our favorite part of our job!

Though there is no way for you to know all of their names or their faces, please remember each one of our 410 students. We have to remind ourselves that these are individual people and not get overwhelmed by the huge amount. It has not been hard at all to have a heart for them and to pursue relationships with them, because we truly love them. The harder part has been using time wisely and not overworking ourselves in this way or overdoing it. I have no doubt this will be an on-going balance struggle in our time here.

We had the opportunity to Skype with our home fellowship in Knoxville this past week and that encouraged our hearts so much. We way underestimated the value of having a body back us up and stay in close contact with us. It’s easy to feel forgotten, being on the other side of the world and having so few people who can relate to us on a deep level while doing our work. Thank you to them, and also a huge thank you to our friends and family who have been so intentional with us. One of the biggest challenges of this transition has been balancing new relationships here, old relationships at home, and our work. Considering the fact that we have close connections in several states, having lived in several states, it’s so hard to stay connected well with friends all over the place. Thank you to everyone for your patience as we work to stay connected, and your continued intentionality! We are certainly learning to show grace to ourselves along the way. We couldn’t do this without you!