AUGUST 1, 2014: CONNIE'S GRADUATION

 CONNIE'S CHINESE CLASS GRADUATION

 AUGUST 1, 2014

Today was my Chinese class final.  We had a good week of class as we finished up our Chinese textbook and we had a comprehensive written exam and an oral exam.  Our test was 6 pages long and later I found out that I earned a 98/100 on the test!!!  The 2 mistakes I made were so, so silly – and I thought I had gone through it 3 times to catch errors.  One mistake was on the dictation part where we had to write the Chinese characters for the number 31 and I forgot the character for “10” which is “shi3”.  The other mistake was that I wrote “qian” instead of “quai” when writing out the characters for “1.6RMB.”  I know both of these and shouldn’t have missed them.  Oh well.  I scored perfect on my oral exam.  I HAD GREAT TEACHERS -- Bi Laoshi and Li Laoshi.

 My final exam.

After my test, I ran over to Dad’s office and Amy met us there and we worked to finish our proposal.  We have another meeting with Mr. Ma Liang at 4pm.  We were curious what his response would be with all of our costs and numbers.  He didn’t really give any response, but just said it was interesting and he would need to go over it and meet with us the next week.  He asked if we would finish it up and send it to him.  So, we didn’t get a “No” but didn’t get much more.  In our document, Vernon put that we thought they should pay me full salary, $50,000, for teaching the programs and then our “house Matron” work would cover our housing costs.  Tuition has been offered for free at this point – that is a $210,000 cost (30,000 per student) that has been offered free for the first year to XJTLU faculty’s children and then the second year it is half price, which will be $15,000.

I am still bewildered as to why he even wants to still talk to us!  The only thing we can figure out is that they are in dire need of some white faces in their school to get it started.  We will see what happens. 

 

At 3pm, before our meeting, we had my Chinese class graduation.  I received a cool certificate and then I also had been asked to give an introduction of my family and give it in Chinese.  My instructors had helped me refine it so I spoke everything correctly.  I had the picture of our family that we took just before Alison was married and they put that up on the bit screen and I gave a 2-3 minutes intro of our family in Chinese.  It went OK. 

 

 Our friend, Jenni, gave a short speech in behalf of all of us students.  

She did great!!

Jenni, Emily and Yuri showed some Chinese paper cutting that they had completed after learning the art at a cultural class.

 Some students sang to a popular Chinese ballad

 I was asked to introduce my family in Chinese.