我很年轻的时候曾经来中国教书。那时我 21 岁，大学刚毕业。我在大连理工学院(现在叫大连理工大学)教本科生，这些学生大多都比我大。我的学生都很擅长化学、物理和工程学，不少人也有将来出国留学的打算，但他们大多从来没见过外国人，也没和母语是英语的人讲过话。我的工作就是让学生们习惯于听地道的英语，并教他们口语，这样讲英文的人也能听懂他们。
那是 1980 年代中期，科技还没那么发达。但我们的确有又大又沉的录音机可以放卡带听，每台得有 5 公斤重，我们搬着它们去各个教室。同样的课我们要重复讲几遍，又不想在黑板上一遍遍写同样的板书，于是我们发明了自己的“大字报”。我买了大张的纸、中国毛笔，还有一瓶墨水，用这些大字报做成了我自己的板书。我们每周有一堂“文化课”，各班的所有学生(好几百人)都一起到一个大讲堂来听课—我们必须非常有创意，因为我们手头并没有很多材料可用，那时也没有因特网。讲到万圣节的时候，我就刻一个绿色的大冬瓜，里面放一根蜡烛;讲到圣诞节，我们就找来一颗很小的树，用纸剪成装饰来装点。
我很高兴能够认识我的中国学生，了解中国的生活。我的学生很多来自非常困难的家庭，能上大学是很了不起的事。他们教我们唱中国歌，邀我们去他们的舞会，还让我们去看他们拥挤的宿舍。有一件事那时的中国学生还不太有经验，那就是约会—那时候男生和女生都怕被人看见在一起，除非两人已经订婚，这让男女彼此了解的过程变得有点儿难。在班上，男生和女生会互相观察，来看自己可能会喜欢谁，而这时他们彼此甚至连一句话都还没说过!
利用春节放假和暑假，我背了个小包游览中国各地。我去了很多地方：北京、上海、广州、昆明、武汉、成都、重庆、西安、青岛和曲阜。跟着学校组织的旅行我们还见识了东北—沈阳、哈尔滨和丹东。即便是去了那么多地方，我从没觉得我已经看得足够了，我的中文学得当然也不够。所以，为了看到更多，同时继续学中文，几年后我又回到中国，开始在使馆工作，而我现在仍然在使馆工作。
时隔三十年，故地重游大连理工大学。
(知乎日报注：以下英文部分与中文内容一致)
I came to China to teach when I was very young. I was 21 years old and had just graduated from college. I was teaching graduate students at the Dalian Institute of Technology (now the Dalian University of Technology) and most of them were older than me. My students were all very smart in chemistry, physics and engineering and many of them planned to study overseas in the future. But most of them had never met a foreigner and had never spoken with some who was a native speaker of English. My job was to get the students accustomed to hearing English as it’s really spoken and to have them learn how to speak so that an English-speaker could understand them.
Because this was the mid-1980s, we didn’t have a lot of technology available to us. We did have big heavy tape recorders with cassette tapes to listen to. Each one must have weighed 5 kilograms and we carried them to all our classes. Because we taught the same class in several sessions and didn’t want to write the same things on the board repeatedly, we created our own “Big Character Posters” (Dazibao) for teaching. I bought large pieces of paper, a Chninese maobi, and a bottle of ink and created my lessons on these large posters. Once a week, all the students from all the classes (several hundred) came to one very large lecture hall for that week’s “cultural lesson” – we had to be very creative as we hadn’t brought a lot of materials with us and we didn’t have the Internet. For Halloween, I carved a large green donggua and put a candle inside; for Christmas, we found a very small tree to decorate with ornaments we cut out of paper.
I had a good time getting to know my students and understanding life in China. Many of them had come from very difficult circumstances and making it to university was quite an achievement. They taught us Chinese songs, invited us to their dance parties, and let us come see their crowded dorm rooms. One area that Chinese students of that time didn’t have much experience with was dating – at that time, men and women were afraid to be seen together in public unless they were engaged, so it made getting to know each other very awkward. In classes, the men and women were watching each other to figure out who they might like before they even talked to each other!
At the ChunJie vacation and summer vacation, I took a small bag and traveled around the country. I visited a lot of places: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Kunming, Wuhan, Chengdu, Chongqing, Xian, Qingdao and Qufu. On school trips we saw the sights of DongBei – Shenyang, Harbin and Dandong. Even with all that traveling, I never felt like I saw enough of China and I certainly didn’t learn enough of the language. So I returned a few years later when I started working at the Embassy in order to do both, and I’m still doing it today.