The Classroom Experience

I've gotten a few requests to shoot and show more pictures of "daily life" for us out here. What does your neighborhood look like? What does the market produce and butcher booth look like? What's it like to bike to school? What does your classroom look like?

I'll try to do a little more to help folks experience even better what life outside of the home is like for us. First, here is our classroom, where we have all of our classes every morning:



We shot this picture when my parents were in town and we were taking them around our campus. And yes, we're sitting in the very seats that we normally sit in every day.

So, first, you might be wondering what our weekly class schedule looks like. We have 4 different types of Chinese classes - Intensive Reading, Listening, Oral, and Extensive Reading. Every morning, we have 1 class from 8:10-9:45 and then 1 class from 10:15-11:50.

Our weekly schedule looks like this:
Monday: Intensive Reading, Listening
Tuesday: Oral, Extensive Reading
Wednesday: HSK Preparation, Intensive Reading
Thursday: Intensive Reading, Listening
Friday: Oral, Extensive Reading

The Wednesday HSK class is a test preparation class that many of our classmates are required to take since they are in an undergraduate study-abroad program and will be taking the HSK test. But since we may or may not take the HSK, and even if we do, we won't take it for at least a year... we use our Wednesday 8:10-9:45 time to get a little bit more sleep and catch up on some homework.

Our classmates are the same through all our different subjects through the week, since we have all tested into the same level (Intermediate 1). So we're kind of similar to a "cohort" in a graduate school program. We may be seeing the same 14 classmates for the next two years. We're coming up on 8 weeks in class now, and I think our cohort is finally starting to loosen up and feel like we are getting to be friends with one another. We may even try to do a pizza and study party with a few of our classmates in the next few weeks.

The classroom is super basic, as you can see. Wooden desk with cubby hole, wooden chairs, undecorated white walls, tile flooring, and mostly-working fluorescent lights. This is probably pretty typical for what a small college classroom looks like out here. It's not fancy, but it serves its purpose just fine. There is heating, which they will probably turn on in a month or so, once it really starts to get cold.