Fellali!

The gauntlet continues.  Every day since we got here we have had lessons/classes from 8-5pm, then maybe have enough time for dinner, homework and lesson planning before bed (or for the more bold, going out and partying)(ß I am not among them).  Many people have gotten sick from jetlag and exhaustion.  I’m glad that I’ve already been to Beijing, because I certainly haven’t had time to explore this round.  My head cold has kept me to early bedtime and low energy activities.

The good news is that so far the classes have gone well.  My sixth graders thought I was delightful, and my teaching partner and I ended up pairing well together.  We had the students do things from making an itinerary for when E.T. visited them to making a story about Superman saving a friend of theirs.  Interestingly enough, Chinese kids don’t seem to care too much for Batman.  Not sure why.

Then, typical to the program it seems, as soon as we started getting comfortable with our classes and partners, surprise!  Tomorrow is your last day teaching them!  You’re switching classes!  So the last day we decided to play games like hangman and songs.  My partner and I had been arguing because he thought that Chinese people didn’t have trouble with “r” and “l”, because they have both letters in their language.  I told him, oh yes they do.  I don’t know why but they do.  So we put Ferrari as the hangman word to test it.  Sure enough, they got down to fe__a_i, and someone got it.  It’s a FELLALI! he yelled.  I win.

My new class is teenagers, and I’ve had some trouble figuring out what to do with them.  We are at a definite disadvantage, because by this point they had had seven days of six classes each, so 42 classes before we even got to them.  If you have only one English class a week, that’s as good as a year of classes.  They told us that if they had to do another debate there would be a mutiny.  We’ve tried teaching them slang, phone etiquette, and conflict resolution/ I statements.  They seem to like it ok but it’s difficult for us to come up with new things that may be interesting to bored teenagers, and we still have another week of coordinating six lessons a day.  I’ve signed up for juniors or primary when we move to our schools in Shenzhen!

My Chinese class has been alright.  I started in the advanced class but after two days moved down to intermediate.  I could understand when the professor spoke, but I couldn’t speak well myself and I’ve totally forgotten most of the characters.  She refused to slow down or explain more, so over half the class dropped down.  The lower class is a lot easier, too easy for most of us, but since we have no time at all to study that’s not an issue now.  The teacher keeps giving us tests though, and most people keep failing.  It’s very hard for Chinese teachers to comprehend that it could be difficult for us to memorize characters, not to mention we literally have no time to even try.  We’ll focus more on our Chinese when we get to our schools and have more time, but right now it’s not really possible.

C’est le vie.  My theory is that they’re trying to weed out the weak of heart.  Tomorrow is our first day off, we are going to the Imperial Palace (Forbidden City) bright and early.  So maybe not really a “day off”, but at least we don’t have to plan another lesson for tomorrow.  I’ve already been, but I think I will go again. 

Ok, I think that’s enough for now.  It’s raining again, so I’m going to run around and find a place to buy umbrellas!