Oops

All our classrooms are monitored by camera as well as a student monitor who is an informant for The Party. I thought I was going to get reported last Monday when I gave my juniors an assignment to interview someone who had lived through the Cultural Revolution and then write a paper on the results of their interview. I naively thought the assignment would be an interesting one. However, after class a few students came up and said that this dark time in China's recent history is a very sensitive subject as it sheds a negative light on the Communist Party and no one wants to discuss it. One student even (respectfully) questioned my motives and even said he thought I might be a spy for the United States for giving such an assignment. So after discussing it with my Chinese faculty friends, I'm changing it to a more innocent subject: China's One Child-Policy.

Other than that, it's been a delightful second week of teaching. Dave and I are exhausted after teaching only two (two-hour) classes each day. It takes so much out of us. But maybe it's because the students are so receptive and involved that we feel so drained; we want to give them all that we can while we're with them.