First teaching

I've taught my first classes now, a drama class on Monday afternoon, and an oral English on Tuesday morning at 8am. Classes here are in blocks of 2x50 minutes, enough to get you in trouble if you're not prepared. The drama class had about 20 students in it, and Wuming had sent me some of the scenes being worked beforehand (mostly Shakespeare and Jonson), so I knew what I was getting into. Astonishingly, even though the semester is coming to a close in about 5 weeks, the students had barely memorized their scene nor had they worked with the text at all. It seems they were in some limbo where they mimed the scene silently (and usually melodramatically), and lines were supposed to come "later," whenever that might be. I did some warmups and then worked through two scenes (Merchant of Venice and Hamlet), clarifying action and giving blocking, or rather, eliciting it from the two actresses playing Bassanio and Antonio. Students are often timid in their choices here, afraid to make a mistake, but after a while they took to it and the class perked up, seeing progress being made. I harped especially on clear choices, specificity, and "raising the stakes" of the scene. I was surprised to find that many students were missing and/or had not settled on their scene yet, and Wuming (who is emerging as one of the most talented and thoughtful of the bunch) told me that students are so overscheduled that they have to skip classes to survive. Still, I'm missing a bit that vaunted Chinese sense of discipline that I assumed was inherent in these best and brightest. From our students, I'm used to natural showmanship and an instinctive sense of theatricality, so quite an adjustment here.
In the afternoon, I spent about two hours in Starbucks, at the price of an 18-Yuan iced coffee, catching up with email, etc.
At 9:15 pm (presaging how late many rehearsals will be) we had the first cast meeting in the conference room of the English dept., and I talked them through the development of the original Einstein's Dreams and our plans for this production. They are a motley lot with mostly quite fluent English, comprised of English students as well as physicists, finance majors, ecological science majors, even a Farsi (!) major. (Why not?) We'll have our first rehearsal on Wednesday before some students leave for the long May 1st weekend.
Monday night I was starting to feel the effects of the jet lag more severely, and so I got not a lot of sleep before having to be up to teach an 8am oral English class to freshmen. But first I had to find the Wenshi (pron. "wen-shrr") building where the classroom was. Remember, I can't read any signs... Students hadn't really been informed that Colin was no longer teaching the class, so they were somewhat puzzled by my arrival on the scene, but I think I made a hit with them by getting them all to talk, playing a little game of Q&A about who the strange German guy was. By the end of the class, they were all laughing and chattering. Their homework for next week is to draft a five-minute statement about what they think should be changed about Beida (which might get me in political hot water; I hear there are student "spies" in classes taught by foreigners). One student told me she was looking forward to class next week because she enjoyed it so much. (Apparently, she was NOT the spy.)
Later I met with "Joe," the TA for the sophomore writing class, whom I had asked to do some photocopying for me (an article about standardization of Chinese names from the NY Times; more potential for doo-doo). Another oral English class in the afternoon went well, too. After this one, a student said earnestly that she knew there were a lot of Jews in Germany, and that Jews are so intelligent, and asked whether I was a Jew. No comment.