I don’t mean to sound like a bitter old schoolmarm, but when did it become the teacher’s job to stop lessons to provide supplies?  I remember forgetting my pen or pencil and asking to borrow one in whispers, hoping my teacher wouldn’t catch me unprepared. So usually when my teenage students announce “I don’t have […]

I planned to write a post about starting a job today, teaching SAT prep. Towards the end of the job interview, when we were talking about where to park and what time to arrive, the main teacher (I’m the assistant) happened to mention that it’s a Chinese Saturday school, hosted in the Sunday school rooms […]

Model posing with Carol and Grace!

Sven shows us blue steel.

He has a lot of modeling experience.

A rare photo of everyone at work.

(Staged, of course)

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Tags: Carol, Grace, Sven, Yuyu

I gave one of my classes a lesson on idioms, as part of my ongoing guest to eliminate certain abused phrases (like overuse of what a pity or using not at all as a response to thank you) from my students’ English. I gave them a handout with a list of idioms and some example […]

In the office the other day…

Sven: I’m off to class to have mad fun with our apathetic teenagers!

Carol: Good job! Did you learn that word from David?

Sven: What?

Meg: He said “mad fun” not “ma fan“. (Chinese for problems or trouble)

Carol: Wow, your tones are almost as bad as Sven’s.

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On Friday, my class played Hippopotamus. This is an awesome game for mixed levels, easily modified for students’ English abilities and not mind-numbingly repetitive. You send one person into the hall while the rest of the class picks a verb. Their classmate comes back and has to guess what action the group has chosen, by […]

I played a round of Who Do You Love? with my students on Friday. You put the chairs in a circle so almost everyone can sit down, and one person is left standing in the middle. The person in the middle asks someone sitting down “Who do you love?”
The person sitting down can say everyone, […]

I played Secretly Eating Pizza, an adverbs/verbs charades game with my teenagers yesterday and today. I put together this one for my Yantai drips, asa reward for all their hard work learning the difference between adjectives and adverbs. The game is quite simple, basically, you pick an adverb and a verb out of two bags, […]

In the belief that such things are very Western, my school encourages me to wear jeans, sneakers and t-shirts to work.
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Tags: China, mail

This morning, some of my students pinned my chalkboard eraser to my desk as an April Fools. Unfortunately, when I touched the eraser and it didn’t move, I grabbed a tissue for the board, and ruined their joke! Mysteriously sticky things… in the classroom… in Beijing… are best left unexamined.
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