Hi again my friends!
Let me write about things that are on my mind these days.
It is not an easy task to open, recruit students and teachers and operate a school here, or anywhere I would think. Since parents must pay extra money to send their child to a private school, and extra money for most parents is not easy to earn, as a private school we MUST provide English classes that are better than and different from the regular classes students attend when they have their own classes during the year in their school. There is a tendency for the best English teachers in a farm middle or primary school to move off the farm and into the city schools where they can usually earn a higher salary and have better benefits available than on the farm. This results, in many cases, in the teaching skill-levels of English teachers on the farms to be lower than in the Middle and Primary schools in the cities. Our wish, for our English training schools, is to be able to give these students (and teachers )a chance to improve their skills and encourage them to learn English so they can have an opportunity to further their education beyond the available schools on the farms.
It is not as difficult to recruit students as it is to find good teachers. We think that a school is ONLY as good as its teachers. We spend a lot of our time visiting class rooms and interviewing prospective teachers for our school. We believe that an English teacher MUST have good pronunciation and grammar skills. If a student learns to speak incorrectly, it is difficult to change these bad habits as they become older.
My own personal plans for the next year are to sign a contract to work for the Education Department here in Dushanzi for a year. They want me to teach oral English skills to the employees of the oil refinery here. I will have evening classes each day with their engineers and teach in out own school on weekends. I presently teach one class of them and they are so happy with the classes that they want more engineers to have this chance and so I will teacher many more classes next year of them.
I also wish to move to another apartment. Where I live now is too noisy for my liking. I am surrounded by dormitories with college students shouting to each other all the time. Now the dorms are emptying as the students leave for their homes. Soon it will be like a “ghost town” here.
I hope you are interested in these details of my life in Xinjiang!
