Sorry the updates have been few and far between! Today we finished the first day of our second week at JTHS. The first week had ups and downs, but we are on schedule, optimistic about what our students will take from the class, and a good time is being had by all.

Background (pre-week 1):

When last we saw our heroes we were getting used to our new habitat in Shanghai after a good time travelling. Roger had been seeing the sights of Beijing and Reid and Hesky had been bumping all over China, but we all managed to meet in the airport and find our way to the flatteringly named Fudan University Foreign Expert building. (in the rain)

The next morning we met the teachers at our first school, Jiao Tong High School (JTHS) The news was mixed. On the good side, they were happy to see us, friendly, and would let us run the class as we saw fit. The computers were pretty shiny as well. There are 40 or so PIIs, pretty much networked, and to our delight an LCD projector which would eventually become one of our best friends (although we don't usually hang out together on weekends). The bad news is this: our internet connection is only slightly faster than semaphore. While it's true we do have two phone lines as promised, one of them is just connected to a phone on the computer teacher's desk, and while Hu lao shi may be a great guy, he just can't make high-pitched squeaking noises as fast or as accurately as a US robotics modem.

Our second school, Children's palace, is another story. They have P3s, dual ISDN, and everything but the kitchen sink. The only people making high pitched squeaking noises were us as we checked out the equipment. Too bad we're not teaching internet there! We will be teaching two concurrent two-week classes on the weeks of July 26-Aug 7, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. One will be "fun with java", and the other will be entirely devoted to Lego robots and related topics.

WEEK ONE

What's a good recipe for the first day of class? 1 part recess and 1 part computers seemed to work pretty well. The students were already there when we arrived, playing hearts, minesweeper, and talking. To dispel immediately any thought that we were going to be unreasonably serious, we acted as friendly and goofy as possible (just act natural!). Before we officially grabbed everyone's attention we grabbed our students one by one, introduced ourselves, and snapped quick pictures with our trusty Kodak Digital Camera for use later in the day. Then it was off to the basketball court to play some games, learn some names, and get everyone acquainted-by force if necessary!

After all the names were firmly lodged in everyone's short term memory, we went back to the computer lab to get started. To test their computer proficiency and see what basics we might have to brush up on, we had them grab a template from the server and make a little autobiography. The end product was complete with their picture (with or without value-added bunny ears), a little story about themselves, and answers to a survey about their computer experience.

When the results were in we thought we'd try our hand at teaching too, since we couldn't avoid it forever! We had to scrap our original idea of surfing the web since our connection was still slow as grandma's molasses, so we decided to talk a bit about the internet and its history. Ack! The language barrier was more an obstacle than we thought, and our first lesson was a big flop. The subject we were ready to teach with the least amount of gab was HTML, so we quickly changed direction and jumped right in after letting the students surf the mini-web we lugged from the US on CD. Honestly the first day of teaching was tough, and it was a lesson well-learned that we couldn't present our material in the way we had planned.

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent learning more HTML. We would talk, and then they would play with the tags. Early on we announced that a personal homepage was our goal for the week. As backgrounds, colors, and other new toys were introduced, students would throw them in with the old ones as they were learning, creating some strange pages. Nobody wanted to play with good taste and decency, but everybody wanted to play with animated gifs and flashy backgrounds. Thursday was spent on design and construction of real internet-viewable pages. Through all the chaos the students came out on Friday with some high quality homepages, which everyone went around to view in a virtual open house.

There went the first week! Pretty much on schedule, not exactly as anticipated, and chock full o' fun. We didn't start the spreadsheet portion of the course this week since we felt it wouldn't be ready for primetime until it was changed to fit our current audience. However, we have high hopes for it on Monday! Also, our students have not yet had a chance to use the internet, so we hope to have a field trip to the Children's palace sometime next week.

And then we took a nap.

THE END  

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