Sunday, May 9, 2010

Thought of the Day: Bring Joy and Understanding to Learning!

After our late arrival Saturday night it was a tired group of three who joined BaoLi and YiBo in the dining room. But the delicious array of breakfast good and several cups of coffee helped some of us begin to recover from our arduous trip.

At 8:00 am we met in Room 302 for our first meeting. Bao Li gave an introduction to the city and some of its sectors. She said that Xi’an is called the Education City because of its numerous colleges and universities.

After we introduced ourselves, Bao Li gave a history of the Global Volunteers program and a list of principles that have helped Global Volunteers be effective in 19 countries.
We did a team building activity to Form goals for our group. Perhaps because there were only four of us, we reached consensus quickly.

Next four managers were picked:
Bob- Journal Manager
Yi-Bo- Health and Safety,
Karen & Allison agreed to share Recreation and Final Evening Celebration

After a seven dish lunch we rested for a while and looked forward our meeting with some of the teachers and students of the college and one teacher from the school for autistic children where YiBo will be working.

Reviewing the schedule and learning more about our assignments was very useful but the greatest pleasure was seeing the three teachers who came- Della, Sunshine and Lisa, and meeting two very nice students who came – Rainbow and Mike, who seemed genuinely pleased to meet us and who each sang a song in English for us. We chatted for a while giving the students an opportunity to speak. Mike said that he liked English very much d. but he apologized for his pronunciation. I told him that I could understand him and I looked forward to helping him. Rainbow, whose English is good, helped Mike understand my questions. Around five o’clock we ended our meeting and all said we were looking forward to our first day at the college.

After dinner BaoLi reviewed some best teaching practices for working with Chinese students. An other-wise pleasant dinner was marred only by the “Mysterious Chopstick Caper” that, to this day, remains unsolved.

-Bob