Last Week

The other day I took a little walk around my M-W school and snapped a couple of pictures just to give a glimpse of the school.  So here they are!

This is the front of the school.  My classroom is on the second floor right next to the red giraffes

This is the walkway from the English classroom to some of the homerooms  Also, the little red berries on the plants are poisonous so we have to make sure the kids don't eat them.

I don't know what the significance of this is, but it's at the school so I took a picture.

Here's the bathroom

That's my desk! And my co-teacher at her desk

Here's my beautiful scooter in the scooter parking lot

The first time I was going to scooter to school, I was reviewing the directions I had written myself and they kind of made me laugh, although they worked perfectly: Right at T, left at T, right at the temple, left at the rice paddy, school is on right.

Last Tuesday morning was an Earthquake drill in all the schools across the county.  We didn’t have a class at the time so I ran about taking pictures because my co-teacher, Grace, is in charge of sending in the report to the government so she needed pictures as proof.  During the first part of the drill all the students put on yellow cushioned hats that made them look like Little Red Riding Hood (except for in yellow) and crouched down by their desks.  Then they all ran out to the track and gathered there to wait for any aftershocks.

Then on Thursday and Friday at my other school my co-teacher, Siena, was gone for a workshop which she had just found out about so I had to plan for and teach all the classes by myself…which was extra interesting since I didn’t have most of the textbooks at home to plan with and since I didn’t actually know how to get to this school on my own.  I remembered part of the route from the week before and looked up the rest on google maps and hoped that I’d be able to find the roads in the morning.  I was quite relieved when I did because this school is about a 25 minute drive out in the country.  Also, once I got to school, a homeroom teacher or an administrator hung out in the back of the classroom during each period I had to teach, so I felt very supported (and also extremely aware of whenever the class kind of fell apart!).  But overall the days were successful enough.

One of my favourite parts of the school day there is when the students try to talk to me in-between classes.  The third graders are probably the most talkative because they’re not inhibited by my foreigness, but still really want to talk to me and they think that just because I’ve spoken some Chinese to them means I’m completely fluent so they just talk away.  On Friday I was gathering materials for the next class (we have 10 minutes in-between classes, it’s glorious) and a few third grade girls were having a discussion in the room.  I wasn’t paying super close attention but it was something about how they get yelled at by some teachers for doing something or other.  Then they all looked at me expectantly as one girl asked, “Do Americans get angry?” I assured her indeed they do and she looked at me for a second then dismissed it with a shrug of her shoulders and a, “well, I’ve never seen it.”  But if her class keeps up what they were like on Thursday, she’ll probably have the opportunity to see it before the year is out!

Also, I had the classes make name cards so I can start to get their names straight and how two kids made it to 6^th grade with the names Empty and Monkey is beyond me, but I plan to amend that situation.  During the first week I also renamed little first grade Ink a more appropriate name.  The ones that are really a challenge though are the names that aren’t really names, but aren’t so obviously not names that I can insist on something a bit more conventional. Lala, Blue, and Wennie for example...