Spring has Sprung?

Can 500 basketball players be wrong. Spring was in the air around Harbin this week. The last vestiges of snow disappeared from the courts on Sunday and by 9:00 AM the students appeared like Canada geese returning to Skaha Park. The temperature was still hovering slightly below zero but the sun was shining. By Tuesday day time highs were reaching into the single digits with the help of clear blue skies and brilliant sunlight.

Alas, it was just a tease. By Friday a nasty cold front moved in from Siberia and day time temperatures plummeted below zero ending with a nice layer of snow today. Google says it is going to warm up again towards the end of this week. Looks like all the budding Yao Min's will have to delay their dunks for a few days.

Classes have begun for all foreign experts. Schedules for most of us are not as sweet as they were last year. Branson and Brian have been working feverishly to reschedule some classes to create a long weekend but neither has had any success at this point. The class schedules for Nonie and I are definitely not as nice as our first semester. We are not teaching Grad students as we had been led to believe. Instead we are teaching third year juniors who we are told are the high achievers at HIT. All our classes this semester are either late afternoon or evening classes. with classes five days a week. We will both teach the same students so this will required the development of another 30 hours of curriculum in addition to what we created for the first semester. It will be another busy semester for us.

I have now met all of our students and their English is definitely stronger than the grad students of last semester. I am now busy revising our developed curriculum to make it more challenging. The classes of 20+ are mostly boys/young men so the testosterone levels are very high and is reflected in very high noise levels during class activities. Two of the classes have no females, three classes have only one while the rest have no more than 6 female students. The decibel level in the classes with the higher ratio of female students is definitely more muted. I am sure Tom our in-house psychologist could explain this clinically but for most parents of boys it would be self explanitory.

I am off to a wedding reception on Sunday and hopefully will have some pictures for my next post.