36 Hours in Billings, MT
25 Oct 2009 1 Comment
in Traveling Tags: Beartooth Mountains, Billings, health care, medicine, Montana, physician assistant, Red Lodge, Rocky Mountain College
While all of China took to the road and celebrated its 60th anniversary with a week long celebration I ducked out of the country for a quick trip to Billings, Montana. The Rocky Mountain College Physician Assistant program had invited me for interview. Though I was already missing teaching English literature and drama to my Chinese students at Xiangnan University in southern Hunan province, I was eager to purify myself with a sojourn to Big Sky Country. That meant exploring the city and its environs, re-supplying, and doing things I couldn’t ordinarily do Chenzhou, Hunan: like enjoy some fine wine and American microbrew.
Chenzhou was a sprawling city that sprang out of the rice terraces of southern Hunan. It continuously spilled out of itself as it metastasized at a frenetic pace ever expanding from Lake Baihu. Now Billings offered a pleasant counterpoint to balance out my experience in China. Here, this neat, self-contained city with cleancut borders arose out of the high plains and was defined by the Rimrock to the north and the Yellowstone River to the south. It was here in Magic City that I would meet and explore the land and her people, and hoped to one day call home.
Teaching British Romanticism in China
17 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in Teaching Tags: alchemy, education, Hermes, Luddites, poetry, revolution, Romanticism
I’ve been procrastinating. A recent trip to Montana left me in a swoon. Now it was just a Movable Feast. But I needed to get back on track and prepare a lecture on American Romanticism & New England Transcendentalism. As I wrote this students were reading excerpts from The Scarlet Letter, The Raven, Song of Myself, &, Moby Dick. Each excerpt consisted of just 4-10 pages because that was all to their anthology. Luckily I was here to remedy the situation with my “traveling library”: 3 Norton anthologies, and several paperback novels.
So this unit on Romanticism wrapped up the first half the semester. We started with Thoreau’s “Reading” to frame the semester. Then we read The Alchemist. It was a simple allegorical novel written in 1988, but as I read it again and discussed it with the class it fit perfectly into the curriculum as a warm-up exercise. The story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd on a road trip to fulfill his dream, practically introduced Romanticism. Clever readers saw that it was a very Romantic text, building on the ideas of Thoreau and Transcendentalism.
Drama – Chinese students step up English skills
14 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in Podcasts
I asked a Chinese professor at the university if a foreigner has ever taught Western drama to college seniors. He said he had never heard of it. A check on Google reveals nothing. I believe I am the first, which is quite an honor. This may be the result of students clamoring for more than basic English and literature to further sharpen their skills.
The Government-Issued Literature Textbook
01 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in Podcasts Tags: allegory, education, Literature, metaphor, The Alchemist, The Cave, theme
I describe the government-issued anthology textbook for Chinese Students. It is good, but has the obvious deficiency of containing only snippets of the greater works. A story by Steinbeck, for example, has only one chapter. So this is just one reason why I began the semester with an allegorical novel about following your dreams.
Will Chinese Students One Day Appreciate Thoreau?
01 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in Podcasts Tags: Bartleby.com, consumerism, education, environment, life-long learning, Literature, Project Gutenberg, Thoreau
With the fast pace of growth in China and its emphasis on modernism, I wonder if my students will one day come to appreciate Thoreau’s ideals, especially his love of nature and his concern for the environment.
