Eric's Beijing Diary

Well, I hired a cleaning lady today, and I have to be here when she is cleaning, so I have some time to write. Fourteen Kwai for two hours. A little less than two dollars. You wouldn't think that a place would get this messy after only two months, especially since I'm not here that much. But it does. I think I'll have her come every two weeks. I had some students over here once, and Bulu said, "You need someone to collect your apartment." It's just one of those things.

In other news, I started my Oracle lab Wednesday. Two months to the day since I arrived in Beijing. I think it's going to be a good thing. I stressed to students that in the Oracle lab, we are going to be moving from practice to theory, rather than the other way around. This is perhaps different from what they are used to, but I think the new approach will be welcome.

So here is how it stacks up so far: Monday I am assisting with Dr. Sun, the dean of the College, in a database theory course he is teaching for the IC design students. Dr. Sun is a tenured professor at a university in Florida, so he is running a joint degree program with that institution. On Wednesday, I am conducting the lab portion of this course, which is Oracle specific. I am offering six labs over six weeks which will address the Oracle database architecture. The end of April, I will start a course which is devoted exclusively to Oracle and Oracle DBA certification. This will be offered to the Software Engineering majors in the college. For the time being, the Oracle courses are going to be restricted to graduate students, which is probably not a bad idea, since their English proficiency is pretty good.

On Thursday and Friday I am teaching Technical English at an overflow campus in Langfang. This is an oral English class, but the administration really wants to emphasize proficiency with technical English. The book they gave me was OK from a technical standpoint, but it was not good teaching English, so I dispensed with it. I went to How Stuff Works and printed out a bunch of articles. This stuff is much closer to what I need. But when it comes down to it, what students really need is to be simply taking a technical course like Oracle in a lab environment. This, more than anything, will get them comfortable with working in English.