Sven: I’m off to class to have mad fun with our apathetic teenagers!
Sven: What?
Carol: Wow, your tones are almost as bad as Sven’s.
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 asking yes or no questions and substituting hippopotamus for the verb. Do you hippopotamus in the morning before school? Can little children hippopotamus? Do you like to hippopotamus?
My class gave huge hints to Charlie Gordon so he was also able to participate, and the game was going well when one of my students said “We should have a punishment for someone who doesn’t know.”
“A punishment? What kind of punishment?” I asked.
“If someone guesses wrong three times, he has to sing us a song.”
“That’s a fantastic punishment!”
Today I was barely in the classroom when my students asked for more of the punishment game. We played a few rounds of Concentration, where the loser had to entertain us with a song or a dance.
It started out with typical teenage antics, mumbling through the ABCs at top speed and insisting that an apathetic arm wave was a real dance, but then something amazing happened. When the queen of my duds lost, she set up a song from her iPod, turned it up, and did a club dance, surprisingly good and more active than I’ve ever seen her, in class or out. Another girl ran to her locker, put on her tap shoes, and tapped her whole routine for us! One boy sang an Eminem song, but I don’t know if it was any good because I don’t know what the kids are listening to these days. Another boy sang a line of Peking opera in a terrifying falsetto… only one line because the class dissolved giggling before he could get very far.
I had every student — my stars, my duds, Charlie Gordon — leaning forward in their chairs, desperate to participate in class. When the bell rang, there was a group groan and requests for another punishment game.
I plan to brush up on Mice Love Rice and strategically lose next time.
*New! Just for my mom! Listen to the podcast version!*
My specs had a tragic accident today. After Sven helped me out at school with a superglue temporary fix, I went to the specs store to get new ones. We get Stick’s contact lens solution at a little glasses shop by our apartment, so I knew where to go, but I hadn’t really looked at potential frames. The prices ran from 98RMB up to over 3000, and the appearance went from hilariously awful to fashion model good, without much correllation between price and appearance.
There were no other customers on a Thursday afternoon, so the staff had a lot of time to help deal with my not-so-great Mandarin. I’m amazed by my Chinese skills, I successfully used the words for eyeglasses and break, with my new friend the past tense le, but mostly I’m guilty of excessive use of you, mei you and jige.
The best part was when the, uh, lens grinding guy (what do you call that job?) came over and asked me if I can see without my glasses. I told him I can’t see anything at all, and he told me that must be why the frames I picked are so big and ugly and I should try these ones instead! Oh, Chinese honesty. I told him I didn’t like the ones he picked either, since they were so loud, they’d clash with my face, and we argued for a while before agreeing on a third set of frames.
My new frames and new lenses came to just under $40, and they really could do it in under an hour, which is something LensCrafters has never managed to do for me. I have a strong prescription, and this is the first time I’ve gotten same-day glasses since I was a kid. This is also the first time the optician hasn’t commented that I have really bad sight for someone so young. Then again, maybe he did and I just didn’t understand him.
I had to call Stick to come down and bring me some cash though, because I’d forgotten to bring any. Fortunately the store is about a block down from our house, so he was there before my glasses were finished.
I guess I forgot to bring money because on the way down, I was a little fixated on remembering my Chinese vocab and worrying about my broken glasses. And, I was bit focused on the fact that the word for glasses and the word for cheap beer are disturbingly similiar. Yanjing means both eyeglasses and a local brewery that produces a beer that’s literally cheaper than water.
I wonder if there’s a separate word for beer goggles.
My reading has improved to the point where I’m no longer tormenting Stick by reading numbers and compass directions from signs. Today we passed one with the combination ??, so I sang “It’s electric! Boogie-woogie-woogie!”
Sometimes I wonder how Stick puts up with me.
Although I’m still mourning my old veggie market, I’ve found a nice new place down the street. I miss chatting with my patient veggie lady, but this new shop is pretty good. The produce is fresh, the shop’s clean, the prices decent, and the employees, after shrieking their surprise that I can (sorta) speak Chinese, are helpful.
When I made my usual stop today, though, one of the shopgirls suspiciously asked me if I’m French.
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, no one, or people who meet a certain condition. You can love people who have short hair or who wear sneakers or whose names begin with J, for example. Everyone who fits the condition has to get up and change places, and the person left without a seat is next in the middle.
It’s a fun game with a mad scramble for seats, and with even mildly creative students it gets better and better. I love people who can talk! I love people who wear underwear! I love people who don’t like Avril Lavigne! With teenagers, through, things like “I love you!”, “I love Nicole!” and “I love handsome boys!” are just incredibly funny to say.
To be honest, though, I mostly did it to see if my duds could move quickly when required. One got right into the spirit of the game, and did a great job throwing herself into different seats and shrieking with her classmates. The other whined and whined about not wanting to play so I sent her to the library for “self-study”. (Our school’s euphemism for “listening to her iPod”, but at least it’s not in my classroom.)
The game has another advantage. I have one student in that class, let’s call him Charlie Gordon, who is usually last to catch on. One kid would say “I love people who wear pants!” and Charlie would sit for a few moments trying to remember if he has pants, and then end up in the middle again. But the good thing about this game is the person who falls behind lands in the middle more so they spend more time talking the English talk.
Let me explain how Saturday morning works in our house. After I’ve been up for a few hours — and I am not an early riser — I try to get Stick moving. I offer him coffee, I remind him of the things we had planned to do today, I ask him what he wants for breakfast, I tell him there’s plenty of hot water if he wants a shower, I mention that some cultures place a value on waking before mid-afternoon. He responds with a grunt and falls back to sleep, completely unable to later remember having had any sort of conversation with me.
Finally, I give up and go back to reading my book, waiting for the sun to set and my vampire boyfriend to start moving. Around 2 PM, I’ll accidentally drop something in the living room. Today it was a jelly bean (a very sad waste, but there’s no 5-second rule in Beijing), last weekend it was a safety pin.
At the moment it hits the floor, Stick snaps awake and shouts “Baby! Are you alright? What was that?”
Listen to the podcast version here.
I heard a rumor at school today that the Tous Les Jours bakery was picketed by anti-French groups (who apparently don’t know that Tous Les Jours is owned by a South Korean company). Anyone know if this is true?
We stopped in Wu-Mei Mart the other night to buy out their entire stock of see if they had any Herbal Essences. To my great delight, I found a rack of the old-style conditioners, but I searched for the matching shampoo until finally a shop assistant showed me where it was.
In my defense, the arrangement of this particular Wu-Mei was, from left to right, an aisle of conditioner, one of hairspray and gel, then soap and lotion, then red giftboxes of cakes and vitamin supplements, and then shampoo.
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, and then you act them out while the rest of the class guesses. Sometimes you get normal combinations, like Slowly Walking, but sometimes you’ll get Lovingly Riding a Bike or Rudely Brushing Your Teeth (I call it that because John, one of my little boys in Yantai, really really liked to “secretly eat pizza”).
It worked even better with teenagers, except for my usual duds, a girls or two per class who do about 2% of whatever the assignment is. Even activities that are usually fun get no response. I’m sort of hoping there’ll be a fire drill or emergency while I’m here just to see if they can move quickly.
I did the game in two classes, modifying the vocab a bit for different level of English proficency, and in both classes, a few duds slowed the game to an unfun crawl when they looked at their words, whined that they wanted new ones, stood in the front for a while deciding what to do, then apathetically waved their hands a little bit, so little that Angrily Exercising was indistinguishable from Languidly Waiting For A Bus, and then stood waiting for their classmates to become psychic.
I know there are dud students in every school in every city, like those kernels of corn that refuse to pop, but I’m stumped as teacher when I plan a lesson that has 18 people waving their hands and begging to go next, and 2 people looking like they’re at the dentist’s.
What do I do here? Do I let the duds sit and stare into spare (I originally wrote “doodle” here but that implies active creativity) while the games goes on, keeping everything fun, fast-paced and focused, but making participation in English class optional? Do I force them to participate, and let unenthused students make it lamer for everyone? I’m considering spiking their drinks, but I don’t know the Chinese word for uppers.
