What do movies say about us?

The weather in Guangzhou couldn’t be more pleasant.  It remains about 80 degrees most days with nights in the 70s, my kind of perfect.  The sun is out all day, however our days are beginning to see shorter amounts of sunshine.  The humidity today was 61%; our laundry dries in one day.  I am not sure how you could improve on that.  We walk to class every morning in short sleeves and sunshine, it seems like sunshine has a direct effect on positive mental attitude as well.

It seems that everyone is settled into a routine, students have figured out how to manage the pacing in their classes, teachers have managed to get everything that needs to be included in the syllabus in the curriculum schedule and the rest is history.  I am beginning to think about what the final exam will be in my classes. I was just informed that the final will be 40% of the grade for my students and should reflect the instruction.  I need to spend time pondering what exactly that will look like.  It is easy to tell the communication improvement in my classes.  The first week of class it was difficult to pull any commentary out of students.  They had never had a foreign teacher before and were very self-conscious about speaking English. They are feeling comfortable with their English now and sometimes it is necessary to stop conversations to move to new ideas. 

The assigned homework this week was to watch an English movie with another student from our class to speak English with in a discussion after the movie.  No Chinese subtitles were part of the assignment.  Today in class we did movie critiques.  It is a sobering experience to think that my Chinese students could judge our U.S. culture and who know how many others in China on the television series FRIENDS, the movie TWILIGHT or PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.  Those were the top three selections that were overwhelmingly the favorite representation of U.S. Culture.  I am still not sure how to respond to that mix and what it really says about us and about what my students believe life in the U.S. is really like.  Whose reality can those three selections reflect?