Job Discussion Forums

[Roger]

Although I already had a job, I agreed to giving a trial lesson. If nothing else, I would at least get to know one more of these ugly public tertiary institutions.
So, what kind of students? Age? Level?
"We are a college. Our students are from 18 to 23 years old. All females."
I don't normally give FREE trial lessons. One reason is that I think it is highly arbitrary and unfair to expect a job candidate to perform ideally during a half hour demonstration of his or her skills that decides whether that candidate is going to earn 100'000 RMB in for a total of 800 lessons over the coming ten months!
Alright, so here I was, absolutely not nervous (smiling inwardly!), thinking of lunch (still two hours away!) and not of the impending fateful interlude.
Greetings, introduction to a gaggle of Chinese adults: Mr P., Ms X., Ms T., Ms T. I tried to remember all their names, although nobody had been told MY NAME!
They talked and gossipped among themselves, in Chinese, leaving me to myself. We were standing in the Dean's office, and I was beginning to wonder whether the lesson would take place at all.
Out of the blue, the Dean said, "Zou ba!" Someone had the presence of mind to tell me, "let's go!"
They herded me into a room that could easily accommodate 100 people. They sat down, while I stood.
Where were the students?
After a while, they told me to begin. "But, where are the students?"
"Ah, the students... there are no students here today. It's still holiday season. Let's suppose, we are your students... In fact, we are all English teachers, except Ms L., who cannot communicate in English, but she is the Dean..."
So, you see it is always good to be prepared for the unexpected.
I began my trial lesson by asking each of my future English teaching colleagues a grammar-related question.
"Ms X., what's an 'infinitive'?"
"An 'infinitive'... ah, eh, uh, I think... an infinitive is.. there are gerunds, participles, and the infinitive is the entry word, right?"
"OK, Ms X., I see you know what an infinitive is. It is a verb, and as you said, it is the one that gets entered as the heading in a dictionary..."
"Mr P., you know most verbs are 'regular' verbs; can you enumerate some that are 'irregular'?"
"To give, to go, to be." He said them with pauses of several seconds between each of them.
Finally, I turned my attention to the third teacher: "What does 'SVA' stand for?"
"S-V-A, maybe 'subject', 'verb', and, ...maybe 'attribute'?"
Correcting her, I explained how important SVA for English was. They all agreed it caused their students to commit major slipups most of the time, and they agreed it was a teacher's duty to pay special attention to this. Had I been too pedantic?
The next stage was a round of the 'Rumour' game. They were familiar with it, but enjoyed playing it. Surprisingly, not one of them could reproduce the words I whispered into their ears correctly! "Hippopotamus and giraffe" became something like "hyperactive T-shirt"!
Part 3 consisted of a passage from the novel "BITTER SWEET" by Danielle Steel. I thought it was particularly appropriate for teachers working at a women's college to get an idea of Western women and their problems. Ms X. seemed to have gotten the gist of the page I had read, while Mr P. refused to answer my question point-blank, telling me to stop it there and then. I thought I had lost the game, and followed the Dean into her office, while the three English teachers huddled together to review my lesson.
The Dean bade me sit down in front of the computer, and that's when I sent a piece of contribution to Dave's...
Five minutes later, the teachers trooped into the office. Ms X. loudly congratulated me - they had decided to hire me! Now began a very hard time for me: how could I tell them I had already accepted another job?

They drove me to their campus some half an hour's drive by car from the downtown area. We arrived at a brand-new structure, tall and gleaming white tiles. Inside, we walked to an adjacent building, then three flights up to view some classrooms and offices. Nobody offered any explanation for the fact that classrooms were bare, with neither desks, nor chairs nor anything else, and still reeking of fresh paint.
From there, they walked me to the ground floor again, past another school building, equally still under construction. At the far side of that building, naked and waterlogged earth was beckoning, and on the horizon I noticed another concrete structure of two floors. We had to negotiate our way to that house across water puddles and sticky, red earth. My freshly-polished German-made shoes were in a mess in no time.
The structure I was shown happened to be the living quarters of the foreign teachers - all flats empty, with no furniture, appliances or even kitchen installations. I remarked that it would be "wise" for them to equip those flats with western-style bathrooms. I was promised these would be installed "by next week, when the term begins".

They walked me back across the messy field full of construction boards, solidified concrete and dirt and into the "Administration Office". The Dean was already there, but upon seeing us in our soiled shoes she ordered us sternly out to wash our shoes! This we did in the washrooms.
When we returned to her office, I noticed that under the word "Administration Office", the plaque also bore the inscription "The Party Committee Room".

I later asked my new-found colleagues whether they were members of the Party. All of them answered in the affirmative.

So, I do not know if you want this job. I can safely say that pay is very good, as are the promised perks; I am not so sure whether they can all be delivered on time.
Suffice it to say, if you apply via the Internet you have no way of ascertaining facts before you actually arrive.
Veni. Vidi. Victi!

[Susie]

Mr P presumably didn't offer any explanation as to why he refused to answer your questions point blank, but why do you think he wouldn't respond to your piece from BITTER SWEET by Danielle STEEL?

What do Veni. Vidi. Victi mean in English please?

I know someone who needs a job: how could she contact those Communist Party Darlings?

[khmerhit]

veni vidi vici---an early example of a political advertising slogan:

i came
i saw
i conquered

veni, vidi, vici. These words, which Suetonius tells us were carried on a banner in a triumphal procession of Julius Caesar (Divus Iulius 37), can serve as a starting-point for an analysis of rhetorical figures and sentence-construction. "I came, I saw, I conquered." Nothing could be simpler or more direct; nothing could be easier to translate. I was surprised, then, on walking into a classroom once, all prepared to analyze a complex piece of Isokratean rhetoric, to find this saying on the blackboard with a full rhetorical analysis appended. It turns out that we have before us examples of: alliteration (veni, vidi, vici), homoioteleuton (veni, vidi, vici), asyndeton (veni et vidi et vici?), trikolon (how about veni, vici?), isokolon (try adding a syllable: veni, vidi, victi sunt), composition in short kommata instead of longer kola (compare: ad hostes adveni et, postquam illorum copias vidi, cunctos facile vici), spondaic rhythm, paromoiosis (similar structure of kola or kommata), parechesis (similarity of sounds, especially between vidi and vici), and perhaps paronomasia (a play on words involving, again, vidi and vici), to say nothing of the overall brevity achieved by the ellipsis of words easily supplied from the (very crowded) context. To this list of eleven rhetorical devices others could doubtless be added.

This analysis is a joke, of course. It pokes fun at pedantry. But it is also perfectly valid and makes a serious point. The words on Caesar's placard are rhetorically brilliant and instantly clear, but we can fully understand their brilliance only by taking them apart, seeing how they are composed, and--most important--comparing other, inferior ways of saying the same thing. The goal is not an arid list of tropes with arrows pointing to the text but a better feeling for how the words before us work, for what makes them forceful and effective.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:G3JvtYMgJYIJ:web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/class/rhetfig.htm+veni+vidi+victi&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[Roger]

You put shame on my face with your philological spin, but I liked it, kommata and other warts and all. I did study Latin, but that was an eternity ago!
Anyway, the classics are still the best sources to shed badly-needed light on current affairs!
The school put me on notice that the housing for expat teachers is "still under construction", and will be for the coming two weeks of the first semester.
That's a classical Chinese case of "deja vu!".

[guty]

Just check out any pack of Marlboros

[Wolf]