Tuesday

So it doesn't look like the block is going anywhere anytime soon, so for now I will continue to update using my loophole, for as long as that remains open. Normally, when the chinese government blocks something, they normally unblock something as well. So I am thinking that in the future, they will unblock Blogspot just to block something else.

Here's what I have been doing in the past few days. Saturday was by far, my busiest day, being involved in TESOL training all day. TESOL stands for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages and it utilizes several different approaches to standard teaching to help maximize the efficiency of both the teacher and the student in language acquisition. The vast majority of the students here are English teachers themselves, so they really love to learn these new methods that we use, so that they can take it back to their students. I have heard nothing but praise from the students for these methods, but some are worried if they go back to their school districts and begin to use them, straying from the traditional format, that they will get into trouble with other teachers and their headmasters. More than one student said they will try to get their headmasters to come to TIP to learn what it is all about. The best example of this was a school district in Beijing (one of the finest in the country as far as academic excellence and technology in the classroom) sent several of their teachers here for training. The headmaster got curious, came himself, and now it is a district requirement that ALL teachers in ALL departments in ALL schools in this district must attend TIP. This was a huge boost to us, because the Ministry of Education definitely took notice of this.