Exams.... kaishi!

It's exam time and this is why I've been seriously slacking at blogging.  I have two weeks of final exams because I split my classes into two.  It's just easier that way!  Imagine listening to 24+ partner dialogues in 1.5 hours... it's just too rushed.  Each week I have about 10-12 groups of two or three students presenting their dialogues to me. 

Each dialogue needs to be seven lines long, no notes, no book.  They have about 20 minutes to prepare after I give them the topics.  I've been really happy with my results and I think they are proud of themselves too.  They definitely couldn't do something like this when we started! 

Here are some of the topics they had to choose from:

• Help a Westerner order Chinese food at a Chinese restaurant
• Discuss the differences between Chinese and Western food with a friend who just got back from America
• Order at a coffee house, but the order comes out incorrectly
• Order at a bar, receive very bad service
• Help a foreigner take a taxi to a tourist location in a city
• You are taking a taxi somewhere and they go the wrong way
• Your friend loses his/her wallet in a mall after buying some new clothes

Grading my nearly 500 students is taking a tremendous amount of time.  Each class takes about one hour to grade.  Then add the time that I have to take to readjust the scores and enter them into a computer.  I easily have a total of twelve hours of exam grading to be done.  I'm half done with grading my classes, but still have a long way to go once I start to adjust the grades based on participation and classwork.

In true American fashion, I camp out at Starbucks to get my work done with a large mug of coffee (Americano, please).  It's been a busy one and this past weekend my good friend Max and his friends from college were also in Qingdao. 

In other news, I'm in complete denial that I am leaving next week.