The opening ceremony

    We arrived at the third primary school as scheduled to attend the opening ceremony for the English Summer Training program.

    A teacher from Shandong Institute of Education taught us some basic knowledge or etiquette about western culture and some noteworthy when dealing with foreigners. As the Olympic Games is approaching, security and stability becomes the first and foremost issue. Our ID number had already been registered. And the teacher from the Institute reiterated the importance of maintaining a formal and polite relationship with the several foreign teachers.

    The rules that we were expected to abide by were:

    1. No one is allowed to leak out any kind of information which may be deemed important to our nation, whether they be political or economical….

    2. We should try to be hospitable and friendly towards all our foreign teachers.

    3. No one should be supposed to ask for any favor from our foreign teachers to enable them to be immigrated to other countries.

    There were also a lot of other relevant rules and I would like just to omit them.

    After that we had a photo taken as a commemoration of the training program.

    I had managed to attend the training program. I had asked favor from my leaders. That was the very reason why I treasured this opportunity. The foreign teachers’ speech at the opening ceremony was just tantalizing to me. Judith, a woman teacher, amazed us by her fluent Chinese. After so long an interval, I got a opportunity to talk with a foreign teacher face to face.

    After the photo was taken, we were arranged to join in an interview held by the foreign teachers. I was the first several trainees to attend the interview. There were several trainees who were quite nervous. I felt a little bit nervous too. During the interview we were after several questions such as:

    1.     Point to the school where you are working at.

    2.     Tell me something about your life or working experience: I have worked for more than fifteen years. I have been transferred to the present school to work for reason that it is a newly-built school and it is better-equipped. So it needs teachers of quite quality and I was lucky to be one of them.

    3.     What did you come here for: I have come here not only to improve my spoken English, but also to learn something about western cultures such as America, Canada, English, New Zealand, Australia etc..

    4.     Tell me something more about you, whatever you want to say, especially something about your students: they are thirteen years old on average. Most of them can go to a higher school for be further educated since our school is quite an advanced one.

    And then the interview was over, we returned home and were expected to go there a little early to see the results of the interview, since according to which we would be divided into different classes of different level.

    All in all, I treasure and cherish this opportunity and I will try my best to improve myself through the teaching of all my foreign teachers.