Never A Dull Moment
I have more pictures to post, both from this weekend and school pictures, but just haven’t had time. I had to wing some lessons in my deskless classroom, and then on break we had a surprise meeting about our roles as the foreign teachers! (I suppose I should be grateful that is was a surprise meeting and not a surprise observation, since my unplanned lessons resembled second-rate daycare more than ESL.)
The meeting was pretty basic, to be honest the disappearing desks are my only problem with the school. The kids are great. My TAs are both nice, and so what if they occasionally misrepresent their English as better than it is? Sometimes, when people speak Chinese to me, I understand some of the words and then guess what they’re saying, so it really shouldn’t bother me when my TAs do it.
The school supplies are fine too. If I ask for paper, most of the time I can get it. I even get blank A1-size paper sometimes. Once I got it BEFORE the start of class AND it was enough for all 25 students! I can also get markers and magnets for the board and colored paper and a ball.
It’s a good school in general, it’s just the “Surprise! Invent 40 minutes of games for 5-year-olds! Go!” that bothers me. I don’t want to be the foreign dancing monkey, I’m a real teacher. I actually do have ideas about effective education, and Pop-Up and Alien Abduction on the fly are not part of it.
The highlight of the meeting was when we were told that we should submit the week’s lesson plans to the TAs before Monday. If we want to print out the lessons, we need to submit them to the printing office a few days in advance of that day, so about a week in advance of actually teaching the material.
I suggested that it might be easier to plan lessons if we were told in advance when the desks would be removed in the middle of the night.
China is never boring.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged China, chinese, education, ESL, games, General, lesson plans, lessons, teaching, teaching wee ones
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Surprise! No Desks!
We were drinking coffee in the office this morning, just before my first class, when I asked my TA to make sure the kids had their markers today. I asked the kids to bring them yesterday, but they’re only 5 so they forget.
“Oh, last night we took the desks out of the English room,” my TA told me.
“What?” I asked.
“The English room is only for playing games now. No more desks.”
“How can they color their letters!”
“You can play some English games.”
I know I make it look completely effortless, but I secretly do put some thought into planning my lessons, and today’s lesson plan did involve the use of chair and desks. Not only because I am an uninventive old stick-in-the-mud who believes in using a flat surface to teach writing, but because both “desk” and “chair” are unit 1 vocabulary words.
One problem with second-language English is that I say “And when were you planning on telling me this?” and they say “Yes”. And besides, the answer was already clear.
Three minutes before first period was when they planned to tell me.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged coffee, games, lessons, letters, Stick, teaching wee ones
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Gadget Addict
Gadgetaddict offers quite the array of tech toys, like remote-control cars or videogames. Some of them are the crazy toys like we just saw in that in-flight duty-free catalog, like the motorized inflatable bumper boat. I think it would be awesome, but I’d settle for the pool to put it in.
Posted in New York City
Tagged awesome, cars, Chinese life, e3, games, New York City, tech
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Rainbow Bridge By Night
Christina’s awesome panoramic of the rainbow bridge.(PS — Eric, the Great Firewall seems to be preventing me from answering your comment, but Stick said the same thing when we saw it.)
Posted in New York City
Tagged awesome, Chinese life, Christina, e3, Eric, New York City, Stick
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Tienanmen Tourists
Yesterday, we decided to catch the bus into central Beijing and do a little exploring. It was touch-and-go whether we’d get out at the right bus stop, it seems that in Beijing, all the streets in the neighborhood are variations on the same name. We found ourselves at what seems to be the intersection of Fuxingmennan Dajie, Fuxingmennei Dajie, and Fuxingmenwei Dajie, but fortunately there’s a giant rainbow bridge at the intersection. I recognized that bridge from the last time I was in Beijing, but that doesn’t mean I knew where we were. It just means I can get back to the hostel where I stayed with my sister when she visited. Not exactly a major attraction.We were told to take the subway but we decided to walk to Tienanmen from there. It’s a bit of a hike, but we discovered the giant Beijing Bookstore and learned some new landmarks for our next adventure.
The flower displays for National Day were being built in Tienanmen. I saw them last year in their completed state, and they looked amazing. When you see the giant completed project, with all the flowers, and pools of water, it’s hard to believe it’s just a temporary installation. It’s even more impressive to see the amount of work that goes into the flower displays. This is the frame for this year’s Great Wall flower installation.
Working on the flowers.
I had a good time with the Tienanmen vendors, too. They can be pushy sometimes, but I feel like it’s a bargaining game with them. I got some Fuwa charms, and I tried to help Christina bargain for a map, but the vendor accused me of learning Chinese to cheat her! (zuan… rip off, right?) Anyway, then a cop came by so the vendor quickly finished the transaction and disappeared into the crowd!
Posted in Beijing, Books
Tagged Books, chinese, Chinese life, Christina, e3, learning Chinese, subway
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Housekeeping or Certain Death?
Most of the time, I can get around on my Chinese. I can read simple signs, I can ask basic questions, and I can recognize both foods I like and foods I won’t touch on a menu. But sometimes, everyday things remind me that I’m really living in a non-English world.
A sign appeared next to our building’s elevator the other day. I looked it over. I didn’t see the “is forbidden” characters from a non-smoking sign, or the word for electricity, or the words for up and down, so I figured it was probably safe to get in. Probably. I mean, “elevator is broken,” has to have some of those characters, right?
Posted in New York City
Tagged chinese, Chinese life, e3, housekeeping, New York City
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Chinese Civilization
Posted in New York City
Tagged chinese, Chinese life, Civilization, e3, New York City, Stick
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