You’re listening to Back in the USSR on CFRU 93.3 FM. I am Siegfried. We’ve come to the final episode of the year
I’m sorry to say. Next week I’ll be
leaving for China for the third time in my life, teaching English overseas
again, and actually I can only stay at the studio until 10 instead of 11 today
because I have to run and get things done.
It’ll be a major challenge going overseas, it always is, with a new
environment and a completely new set of people in my life. But that’s the name of the game when you
teach ESL. My destination this time will
be the Ningbo Institute of Education, it’s a teacher’s college, where I’ll be
teaching conversational English and pronunciation. In other words, spoken word. And seeing I’ve been into spoken word and
performance poetry since 2010, the same year I started at CFRU actually, it’s
only fitting I should be teaching spoken English when I do ESL I guess.
Ningbo is a pretty interesting place. It’s a major port city just south of Shanghai
in Zhejiang province, and it’s been a major port and trading center since the 7th
Century so there’s a lot of history there.
I was surprised to learn that the city is actually comparable in age to
Suzhou, the ancient Chinese city I worked in during the 2016-2017 school
year. Just like Suzhou it has old
temples, pagodas, old sections of the city wall and so on. But, of course, I’m mostly interested in the
people I’ll be working with. Seeing it’s
a teacher’s college, they should all be post-grads who more or less know what
they want to get out of the class, unlike the high school kids I was teaching
last time I was in China who were there only because they had to be.
It's different every time. The first time I went to China was in 2013
when I worked at the Inner Mongolia University for the Nationalities in
Tongliao, which is located north of Beijing in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous
Region where Mongolian is an official language alongside Mandarin Chinese. That job was also teaching spoken English,
except that it was to all kinds of different university students, some of whom
preferred to sleep in class instead of listening to me. China is a really huge country, a really
diverse country, and even though this is the third time I’m going there, the
third year I’ve spent living there, I’ve barely scratched the surface.
As for what happens to the show while I’m away,
there’s been a concerted effort to keep it going in some form. Clara Sorrenti, my comrade and the communist
candidate in London Ontario during the provinicial election, wants to keep the
show going as a podcast. So it won’t be
on CFRU, but it will be online. The plan
is to put out the first episode sometime in September, so hopefully all you out
there won’t have to wait too long for new content. Naturally I’ll be keeping you up to date on
the show’s blog and hopefully there will be an announcement on CFRU’s website
when the podcast starts up, so don’t worry, you’ll hear about it when it
happens. Who knows, I might be able to
contribute some content to the podcast from China every now and then. So stay tuned for that, it should be
exciting.
Be that as it may, it still feels a bit surreal
sitting in the studio here and doing the last show of the year. Hopefully I’ll be back at some point, but who
knows. It’s time for an adventure I
guess, and I really don’t know how it will all turn out, but it should be
interesting.
Gang Starr - Above the Clouds
Paul Robeson - Paul Robeson at the House Un-American Activities Committee
Paul Robeson - Going Home
Charlie Chaplin - Final Speech from The Great Dictator
Willie Dunn - The Ballad of Crowfoot
Bambu - Monsters
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