Teaching Life at Union College

After the teaching training in Washington University in St. Louis, I traveled around North America for 3 weeks, and arrived at my host university, Union College, at the end of August. Union College is in upstate New York, and is about 30-minute drive from Albany, the capital of New York State. The campus is not as big as Washington University, but Union is definitely an amazingly beautiful school filled with energy and positive vibes. 

I was a Chinese teaching assistant at Union, and I took charge of the lab sessions. I prepared drills and activities for the students to practice what they had learned in the regular classes, and I also talked about interesting cultural aspects in Taiwan and in the Chinese community. American students are active in class, and most of them are willing to speak up, so I enjoyed the interactions with the students all the time. It was my first time to teach Chinese, and seeing the students work so hard learning Chinese made me feel so proud of them, and I was also feeling proud of being a Chinese native speaker myself.

Of course, there were also some challenges for me as a language assistant. I am a traditional Chinese user, but almost all my students were learning simplified Chinese. Although Simplified has never been a problem for me, there were still times that I did not know how to write the characters that the students were asking. At first, I got kind of nervous whenever this happened, but later, I told the students that I might sometimes need to look up some words because I use traditional Chinese, and it was totally acceptable for them.

Another challenge is the Chinese table. Chinese table is a campus-wide event at Union, and it takes much more time and efforts to prepare than the lab sessions. To organize a Chinese table, I had to come up with an interesting topic, design the visual for the campus-wide notice, prepare the food, deal with technology issues and host the event. It was really a lot of work. However, with planning in advance and the assistance from the school, professors and friends, the Chinese table always went smoothly, and they are definitely great experiences.