Home on the Range

It's Week 11, mid-term for my Tongling Senior 1 HS English class, and they've just received their "big one", their first real writing assessment. You can't overestimate the difficulty of writing fluently in a foreign language. Until now I've not felt the students had done sufficient practice to make any assessment meaningful. This "hold off" approach is a difficult concept to communicate in a Chinese classroom because education here relies heavily on memorization and frequent exams.
I trust my students will rise to the challenge and do a bang up job with their interpretation of the 1876 Western standard: "Home on the Range."
The pre-writing activities have been a great opportunity to learn about a very very foreign culture. Tongling is a small Chinese city about the same size as Seattle, (less than 1 million), and the agriculture most common here involves tiny market gardens squeezed into spaces between buildings and on steep hillsides above construction sites. So, being able to explain the photograph I took of a ranch near Burns, OR, in September 2013 during a Cycle Oregon event, has taken a lot of effort.