School

Monday, September 7
I teach 2 ESL classes--Mr. Dave’s way. Dave is the full-time ESL teacher, and he does a super job. I am sticking close to his side to pick up as much as I can from him. We zip through 4 books in 2 months basically. I can't be Mr. Dave, but I'll develop my own style in time. Basically, though, ESL just gets in the way of what really needs to be done here, and that is, first and foremost, to organize the library so that it serves the educational needs of the teachers, students, and curriculum. A realistic description of the library at this point could be: finding a book is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Other descriptions could include: no long-range plan; no thought put into collection development; no understanding of the purpose of school library; no concept of information media, etc. Some other concrete descriptions would include: no call numbers on books, no card catalog, limited database capability-- all in Chinese. For any librarians out there, imagine not being able to read any of the data about a book--but hey, in this case it hardly matters because THERE IS NO DATA! I have learned, however, how to check-in and check-out a book, which is about all the system is capable of. The Follett rep is coming today. I hope to get funds for a real management system. In the meantime, I am sorting the fiction into reading levels and putting call numbers on the books. Then I can at least teach how to find fiction titles and authors.

At today's staff meeting we learned about all the fun stuff that is planned for the year—several field trips, some of which are a really big deal, like Qingdao, Xian (home of the terracotta warriors), and Hongzhou. (So,that's where the money goes. ) The Christmas program is a big deal; International Week; Chinese New Year; Science Fair; Book Week/Fair; etc, etc. Next Monday is Mid-Autumn Festival when everyone buys/eats Moon Cakes. At the end of the month is a week off for Harvest Festival. What to do with that, I wonder. I'm still hoping/waiting to play tennis. It costs $3/hour at our court, not bad, but I need someone to play with. I have Cathy, Janice, and Xiaohong, the beautiful assistant principal at the middle school, but getting it arranged seems to be not so easy.