Monthly Archives: August 2019

I’ve been involved in English teaching in China since 2002. I first taught IELTS speaking classes at New Oriental from 2002-2004, and then I helped to found New Channel and worked there from 2004-2016. Since leaving New Channel, I’ve been encouraging students to practice English through my “Morning Reading Club” public WeChat account. Two things […]

Last week I read The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. I’d heard it mentioned in enough different contexts that I thought it would be interesting. It was. The basic idea is super simple: people express and receive love in different ways, and it is helpful to think about how the person we wish to […]

We live in a community in Beijing with four buildings. It’s a “gated community”, but since almost all apartment buildings in Beijing are groups of buildings with gates, it doesn’t have the same connotation as a “gated community” in the US. Each building has seven entrances and twelve floors, and each entrance has two apartments […]

Growing up in North Carolina, I always had a sense of pride about the “First in Flight” slogan on our license plates, and I even had a resistance to Ohio having “Birthplace of Aviation” on its license plates. Those feelings of pride and resistance, along with many feelings associated with my various identities, have faded […]

Today is our fifteenth wedding anniversary. 15 years ago today, my wife and I gathered with friends and family to commit to join together as a couple and family. We met five years before we got married, and we got engaged on Christmas Eve of 2002. I was a bit nervous about proposing, so I […]

I didn’t use to drink coffee, but about ten years ago my office moved to a building with a Starbucks on the first floor, and my addiction began. For a while I was drinking two Venti Brewed Coffee per day (one in the morning and one in the afternoon), which is roughly the equivalent of […]

One of the things that living in Beijing has done is give me an appreciation for blue skies and clean air. Yes, that appreciation comes from exposure to horrible pollution, but it’s an appreciation nonetheless. Bad air days in Beijing are depressing. It actually took me a while to realize this–not only do 400 AQI […]

There has been so much change in China over the past 40 years of “reform and opening“. Over the past 20 or so years that I’ve been coming here. Over the past 10 years. Over the past 5. Of course, the whole world has changed, including the United States, where I am from. But the […]

I’ve actually only read the transcript, but this talk by Peter Kaufman is pretty great. He’s talking about simple concepts, he has some professional speaker tics, and he sometimes compares things that aren’t directly comparable, but he does it in a way that left me with a deeper impression of these two simple concepts than […]

Our 4-year-old son has been going to preschool for the past year. We’ve been thinking about what we want for his education. Certainly, he’ll take more responsibility for what he wants in the future, and I suppose in some ways he’s taking the most responsibility for it now (ok, most ways), but we would like […]