Lecture Week!

Finally, after two weeks, our third week began and we finally started teaching students. Monday we gave a two hour lecture on Introduction to Programming with Python. The students supposedly had experience with C before, but as I walked around the classroom trying to assist them with the mini exercises, many of them had no idea what a for loop or while loop were, and what made it more difficult was their English listening and speaking skills weren't as fluent as we hoped it would. I ended up trying to explain in Chinese what a loop was, or that you had to convert a string into an int before being able to use mathematical operations on it. It was definitely an interesting challenge for me, and I made a note to myself to look up key Chinese terms for the next lecture I would give. I ended up teaching lists, strings, and dictionaries, talking at a very slow pace and using Chinese whenever I could to clarify my ideas. The students were quite impressed with how much one could do with python, and I myself started feeling the love for programming again ( say what?! )

Later than evening Louis and I gave a lecture on American culture. Covered everything from film, education, music to dance. Dance was my favorite part. We taught them how to dougie and shuffle. They seemed really impressed, and I told all the guys if you mastered these moves all the ladies will want you ( i'm really good at faking this type of confidence :P )

Had some volunteers come up to dance and try it out. Girls are very very shy, and I had to drag some of the guys up, but all in all it was fantastic. One student told me he used to be very shy, but after tonight and seeing my energy and enthusiasm, he said he would change and try to get out of his comfort zone more. Really proud and happy of everything we've done and will continue to do throughout the week!