Senioritis

I'm really loving the freedom I'm being allowed to exercise in lesson planning for my senior students. With their IELTS standardized tests passed  and college apps all submitted, our focus has turned mainly to current events and pop culture. Our sessions usually involve watching and discussing international news, YouTube videos, gossiping about Chinese and American celebrities, and talking about future plans. I'm so thankful that they have other teachers for reading and writing because that leaves the fun part to me: fluency! My primary purpose here at Jin Dongfang is to prepare my students for the IELTS (a big standardized English test Chinese students take in order to get into English-speaking universities abroad), but now that that my Seniors have that out of the way, I can focus on getting them as comfortable as possible speaking English and preparing them for Western culture shock :) !!. Today I loved showing them this video about the 626, a microcosm of Asian (mostly Chinese) immigrants in Los Angeles. Got me thinking of doing a lesson series on major minority communities in America.. if you have any ideas, please shoot them my way!

Ameson Year in China Video Contest Entry

Ameson, the organization that set me up with a job in China, is holding a contest for video and photo essays that reflect on our experiences teaching English in China for a year. There are some pretty sweet prizes including all-expense-paid trips to Hong Kong and Yunnan province. I've amassed a somewhat ridiculous amount of photo and video footage since I got here, and so compiling a video under five minutes was a bit of an undertaking to say the least..

Here's the official contest poster...



...and without further ado, here is my video!
(Click on the gear icon on the lower right corner to improve video quality)