Posts under ‘China!’

Action verb: “a word belonging to the part of speech that is the center of the predicate and which describes an act or activity.”
Parentheses: “a word, clause, or sentence inserted as an explanation or afterthought into a passage that is grammatically complete without it, in writing usually marked off by curved brackets.”
The following is a [...]

I haven’t been writing near as often as I’d like. My theory: no matter where I am in the world, spring is always a busy time. This spring has further supported this theory.
Over the past few months, I have been working on a few things, including a virtual global classroom project that connected my university [...]

This assignment was short and sweet. I asked students to create a new slogan for the University, and students came back with meaningful one-liners. We built off of a class discussion that loosely and broadly defined our school’s purpose and also acknowledged the current slogan (translated to the best of our ability): “Striving for Integrity. [...]

The red Chairman turns cobalt, turquoise, tan, purple then to a familiar green. A rainbow of symbolism seeps from the Ren Min Bi as mood ring analogies strut onto the page: green with envy and red with passion and every feeling and hue between. More than 100 years of change change change has sprung a [...]

Two months of nothing. 65 days and no written rain. No new stories, or even tidbits, to wet readers’ whistles. And I realize the dust is starting to kick-up. Yes, I’m thirsty too.
I can’t think of a  better way to turn on the flow again than to publish some material from other writers. This should [...]

It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too [...]

I have just posted some work from my current students here in Xi’an. It’s taken me a while to get these published but better late than never. these are examples of my introductory assignment at the beginning of the semester. Their mission: to write one sentence beginning with the word “I.” Mission accomplished. Check out [...]

Rain and clouds are all the rage in Xi’an. Must be sumthin in the water. In my first seven weeks here, I’ve been trudging under gray skies and through my fair share of puddles.
While putting one foot in front of the other around campus and downtown, I’ve had to look to the ground more often [...]

Officially Back in action
I’ve been all over the place (literally) the past four months. Winding up my second semester in Xinxiang, traveling with my friend Carolyn, heading back to the States for a month-long visit, and settling into my new life at the Shaanxi University of Science and Technology (SUST) in Xi’an, Shaanxi. In other [...]

After a three-month absence, I’m back to writing again. I’ve been having some technical difficulties with publishing pictures correctly, but instead of prolonging another post, I’ve decided to put up a picture-less story. . .
Language has been kind of a big thing for me over the past year. Learning Mandarin has been a roller coaster [...]