Can We Borrow Your Voice?

As I have mentioned before, life in China is never dull and the opportunities that come knocking on my door continue to baffle me. Take yesterday, for example...I was asked to make a recording for a high school English class. So, I went with another American teacher to a recording studio on campus and there we sat for about 5 hours recording the discs. After some editing and possibly another hour or so of re-recording, the discs will be ready to be used for listening comprehension classes in Chinese high schools! The woman who was helping us record kept saying that I had a beautiful voice...I bet those high school students won't think so after they've had to listen to me for 5 hours! Oh, I can imagine the jokes and imitations already... :) Anyways, I got paid 1,000 RMB for this little gig, which is 1/3 of my monthly salary for teaching!! You could say that I jumped eagerly at this chance. Here is a sample of the conversations we recorded:

W: Hello, Jim. How were your travels to Paris?
M: Very nice. We saw many famous sights and ate a lot of tasty food.

Or, of course the ones about America:

W: I do not think that America should use so much paper.
M: How much paper do they use?
W: Well, enough to kill about 850 million trees.
M: Wow, that is a lot of trees that have to die!

Whether this is true I'm not sure, but just a thought...maybe they shouldn't be criticizing our use of paper until they have a solution for the number of plastic bags they use! We all have our problems, right?

As I mentioned in my last blog, I've been spending a lot of time with my students before they head home for break...here are some pictures!

This first one is with Anya, one of my tiniest students!


Maybe you can see the stuffed rat/mouse that I am holding. My students gave this to me as a Chinese New Year's gift since we are heading into the year of the rat.


With 3 of my boy students...out of 150 students, I had only 22 boys this semester.