It’s Like Sipping from a Fire Hose

A Webinar for Learning about China

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Photo by Joann Pittman.

As I noted previously, my first teaching stint in China was in the city of Zhengzhou. My teammates and I were assigned to a small provincial teachers’ college on Weiwu Road. Next door to the college was a fire station. Every few months or so, the firefighters would haul out their trucks for a good cleaning, hooking up the hose to the hydrant, pointing it into the cab, and then blasting away! It seemed like an odd way to clean a truck, but at the same time, brilliant.

One time I was ready with my camera. This has become one of my all-time favorite pictures from my 20+ years in China.

It was also the inspiration for the title of a webinar that I will present on August 26: Learning about China: Sipping from a Fire Hose.

China is complicated. It is both a 5000-year-old civilization and a 72-year-old nation. It has a free-wheeling capitalist economy presided over by a Communist party. Traditions run deep and change happens at a dizzying pace. Where do you go to make sense of it all?

In this webinar, we will explore ways to learn about China, from language and culture to history and contemporary society. What books to read? What online resources to dip into? The goal is not to point you to facts and figures, but to provide tools that will set you on a path of life-long learning.

To accommodate people in various time zones, we will do the presentation twice:

Session 1: Thursday, August 26: 1PM US Central Daylight Time (UTC 6:00PM)

Session 2: Thursday, August 26: 7PM US Central Daylight Time (Friday, August 27, UTC 12:00AM)

For more information, go to: Learning about China: Sipping from a Fire Hose.

Grab your rain gear and plan to join us!

Joann Pittman

周宁现任华源协作伙伴关系与中国事工副总裁,并担任《每周中国快讯》(ZGBriefs)编辑。 加入华源协作之前,周宁曾在中国工作 28 年,期间担任过英语教师、语言学习者及项目主任,也为在中国工作的机构与企业提供跨文化培训。她曾在明尼苏达州的西北大学(University of Northwestern–St. Paul)教授中文,并在惠顿学院(Wheaton College)及泰勒大学(Taylor University)教授中国文化与…