Frustrated, Busy, and Excited!

Wow, it has been a long time since I posted on here! I don't really bother much with blogging any more, because of my shift towards video blogging.

So.......what's going on?

Well, tomorrow is the first day of my second year of teaching at Lanzhou Jiaotong University. I'm excited - things will be a little different this year! I am teaching a writing class this semester, and I have complete freedom to do whatever I want in that class. My co-teacher and I are the first ones to teach writing to non-English majors at Lanzhou Jiaotong University, so we are both excited and nervous about it. We've chatted a lot and shared our ideas, and I believe that it will be a good thing for me. I have no experience in creating any kind of real curriculum, so I am excited about what this could do for me in the future.

 There's only a few other things going on worth mentioning. One is my video blogging, which most of you are familiar with, and that is simultaneously the most frustrating and difficult and satisfying thing that I have been doing in these past few months. I have a whole queue of videos already finished and queued at the moment, but the one that I've been working on at the moment is about the One Child Policy.


The One Child Policy video is driving me crazy at the moment - it's such a charged topic, emotionally and politically, and there are a lot of ugly things that have arisen out its implementation. The hard part is presenting it objectively, without too much bias, talking about the major points of it, and also trying to do it under 10 minutes. That's pretty tough. I filmed one, edited it, thought it was good......but after I slept on it, I researched further and found out that a few things I said were just totally wrong and naive. Oh, well, at least I didn't put it up.

Well, what else? Not much, really.......just Ultimate Frisbee games on Sundays, which is always a great part of my week! There's been a lot of fun had, and a lot of great friends and memories have been made because of Ultimate Frisbee. It's surprisingly popular here - once students get started on it, they seem to just latch on!

It's a shame that I don't utilize this site more. I suppose I could use it to promote videos or something. I logged back on today and said, "Wow, this is a great page! How did I do that?" Haha

Well, I suppose that's about it. I think I WILL start posting on here more. Writing this was fun and it felt good to be doing it again. I don't need to put in as much time as I do for a video!

Anyway, I'll talk to you guys later - much love!

Austin

Click here to go to my YouTube Channel!