From: xyang@bcars279.UUCP (Sherry Yang)
Subject: Re: Foreign Teachers in China
Reply-To: xyang@bnr.ca
Organization: Bell-Northern Research Ltd., Ottawa, Canada
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 19:29:33 GMT

>In article <17632@mindlink.bc.ca> Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca (Crawford Kilian) writes:
>>In 1983 my wife and I taught at the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages.
>>The experience is still vivid, and taught us a great deal about our own
>>culture and education system as well as those of China.

I stayed in the same institute for about 3 months (late 1986) before 
came to Canada. Our English teacher was from Australia at the time. He 
is kind of a substitute teacher as the one supposed to be there went
off to Beijing in the summer and found a job in US Embassy and never
bothered to thinking of our 50 some students waiting for the oral
English class he supposed to teach.

We had only few classes with the Australian teacher (I even couldn't
remember his name as the contacts were so scarce.) He seemed was a
quiet guy but his wife and daughter were more well-known than he was
among the students.

>>
>>I'm curious to know whether some of the participants in this newsgroup might
>>want to discuss their experiences with foreign teachers during their years as
>>students in China. I don't want to direct the discussion, but it would be
>>interesting to know what your first impressions were, how you interacted with
>>foreign teachers as opposed to Chinese teachers, how the foreign teachers
>>responded to conditions in your school, and so on.

My first foreign teacher was from the States. He was an associate
professor of English Literature Department in Album University,
Alabama. Of course, he is well qualified for his job (he was teaching
us in Hunan University, Foreign Language department during 1985-1986.)
Besides his good teaching, he has done a pretty good job to let us 
understand the American culture as well as living custom/habits. 
I remember that one day he showed us 
his rental lease (he rented out his 4 bed-room house for $400/month
while he's in China) and explained to us how to rent a place from
someone and blah blah. The other day he showed us his driver's
license and told us why he wanted to donate his body to Red-Cross
in case of a fatal accident. Many students in our class couldn't fully
understand those things at the time.

He enjoyed a great deal of his staying in Changsha at that time. He
thought these Chinese students (most of us were engineering students 
preparing to study aboard) were the best he had ever taught (very 
dedicate/hard working and those sort of stuff). He wanted to come 
back teaching in China after his return to US. I heard that he 
managed to teach in Hubei University, Wuhan in 1990.

On the other side, his wife didn't enjoy that much of China as he did.
She was complaining about the cooking (prepare the food especially) 
because if they want to have chicken for dinner she had to buy a
hen from the market in the morning and kill it herself and clean
out the entire thing. Another thing she complained was the laundry
facility and the other inconvinience in their daily life. 

They brought three children along with them at that time (they have 
four all together.) The youngest one was 7 and went to a local 
elementary school and learned speak Changsha dialect very quickly.

I still appreciate his teaching today not only for the language but
also because he opened a window for us, who had never had chance to 
experience anything foreign in our lives upto then, to the outer world. 
Things may be different today than 6 years ago, in the eyes of a 
Chinese student, since there are so much foreign influence on almost 
everything in China now. I won't be surprised if someone just came 
from China know something here I never heard of even though I've 
been living here for years.