Teaching schedule

I got the essentials of my teaching schedule, sort of. I should say that the classes are scheduled a bit differently here. To begin, most classes meet only once a week, unlike in American universities where classess meet usually three times a week. So my normal teaching load at Weber is four three credit courses per semester, or twelve hours a week. We were told that our teaching load at Chinese universities would be 14-16 teaching hours, so I knew it would be higher. But I did not know that for the most part each of those hours would be a separate courses. So here is what I got.

To begin, I will be teaching 8 hours of something called British and American culture. I knew this was a very popular course at universities here. And I also told people when I was asked that I know nothing at all about British culture. Nonetheless I was told there would be a textbook, and that it was important that I stick to it and not only teach American culture, and I said fine. Second, I will be teaching 8 hours of something called "Oral English," which is essentially what I taught this summer and is just getting people to practice speaking. But the course will only meet every other week. So I will still each class of students eight times. Finally, I am to teach a course on American film that meets two hours a week. This should be fun. I get to pick the films, primarily because the university owns no films, so that means I have to buy the films. But dvds are cheap enough out here. I was also told that I should teach "healthy" films that teach values. So I guess that means I won't be showing the episodes of season one of the sopranos which I bought with me.

To summarize, this means that every other week I will be in the classroom for 18 hours and every other week I will be in the classroom for 10 hours, which averages out to 14 hourse a week. The culture course, because it is simply teaching out of a textbook, should be easy, if boring. The oral english course will only meet 8 times so that should be pretty easy to prepare, and the film course should be fun. I am still hoping to do some activity that will let me understand in a little more in depth manner the intellectual climate here, and I found out there is a National debate contest that students participate in and I am trying to convince them to let me train the students. But I haven't heard back on that one yet.