First Day of School and my Favorite Thing

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So today was my first day of school. I just had my first class but it was a K3 class so I only teach for one of the two hours. There were 6 students in my class all around the age of 8 or so. Since it was such a small class we ended up quickly going through everything that I had planned for the day. Jennifer (the substitute Chinese teacher) sat in the class and didn't do too much but help me the whole time (which I was very happy about). She didn't have too much that she needed to translate, just every now and then. I taught them "What is your name?" "Where are you from?" "How are you?" and "How do you feel?" I explained to them what these questions are in Chinese and English and had them repeat the questions a couple of times. I also explained how someone can answer these questions and that we can say "I'm happy" when someone says "How are you?" This would normally be used to start more of a conversation, someone would normally say "Oh, why are you happy?" but I didn't explain that today. I'll probably explain that next week. I think the teaching went very well although I did get a little confused about whether or not to give them English names. Next class I need to plan a lot more activities for them to do since there aren't very many of them. Right now I'm waiting for my K6 class to start. There are more students signed up for this class and their English is very much higher so I'm going to try and play "Two Truths and a Lie" with them. We'll see how it goes and I may use it for my K8 class this afternoon. I'm a little bit nervous about my K6 and K8 classes as I am teaching the entire two hours and not just one hour. But hopefully it will go well. I think I am pretty good at making up things for them to do in my head (I had to do a lot of this for my K3 class).

My second class was a K6 class. Dina was the teacher assistant for this class. She has a fairly high job for the school and takes classes at a college nearby so she is a very good teacher with very high level of English (unlike some of the other Chinese teachers). In the K6 class there were 12 students (my largest class for the day). The students were pretty awesome. We played Two Truths and a Lie and it was pretty difficult for them. They then had a "find someone who" activity and a chart to fill out. For the find someone who activity they are given "Lives near Rockies English School" (the school I teach at) or "Sometimes likes to eat stinky tofu" (a type of tofu here that smells like rotten garbage) and have to turn it into a question and find one person who fits each description to write their name down. They figured out how to ask these as questions (since I taught it to them) but then we started the game without having them fill out the sheet with the form of the question. So I stopped them and they filled out the questions and then we took a break (an hour through the class). When we came back they finished the game and did the chart which was "Name//The day before yesterday I...//Then I..." I explained this game and its vocab much easier. The students seemed to like these games fairly well (for the first day at least). Then I explained the homework but we still had 10 minutes left in the class so I tried to fill up the time with random stuff. Dina just said that I should prepare maybe one more game next time and it will go very well. We have one weak student and one extremely talkative student in this class.

My third class was after a very short lunch. I just went down to the phone stall and got a coke and some bread and had a moon cake that another teacher provided me. Then Mary helped me get the activity for my third class. She's really nice. We have the same days off so she's going to take me and teach me some of the city. Hopefully I can learn more Chinese from her too. I'm really looking forward to spending more time with her. As for my third class it was a K8 class so I taught the entire class all by myself. There was only one kid that was fairly annoying and always kept talking. We played Two Truths and a Lie again but I had to get them to play it twice because they were using sentences that were too easy. I also had them write down two questions that they had for me (I had the K6 class do this too) that I collected so maybe I can check their level of English a little bit (if they wrote down more difficult questions. Unfortunately some of the stuff that we went over today in the K8 class was review but not very much of it. I really enjoyed having a class that I got to teach all by myself. They played a game called the Gossip Game where they get to read a short reading (that was a little too high for their level - a lot of vocab for them) and then either lie about themselves or not in a big group. They really enjoyed this. Their were 10 students in this class and they really seemed to enjoy being with me so I hope this keeps up.

As for food here, it is a very strange concept. Yesterday one of my friends suggested that I get the soup at this one Korean place. He said it with such a strange look in his face that we kept asking him what he meant. Apparently the soup that he was suggesting us to eat had dog in it. Like I said I'm trying to eat the most vegetarian things I can get here but there are an awful strange number of other things here that people eat that I've never tried before. I would never be able to eat dog for ethical reasons. In the markets they have silk worms (which look like large fat snails) that crawl around on the plates that people put them on to sell them. The first time I walked by one of these plates it scared me a lot. I'd never seen anything crawling around that people were selling in the markets. Apparently they are supposed to be eaten like popcorn. Also most of the fish and seafood that people sell here they sell live so every now and again you'll pass by someone carrying a tray full of live crabs (or something like that). It can be kind of frightening the first time but then you quickly get used to it.

Nicknames. Sheesh are they difficult. The man that I signed everything (Wayne) with refused to call me Darby throughout my e-mails. It should be very difficult for him, after all he's from Canada! But now that he's called me Jennifer the whole time I can't change it here. Now it's going to be very strange. I already had an entire day's worth of classes where I introduced my name as Darby and then the principal insisted that I change my name to Jennifer for the students. Apparently nicknames are a bad thing here (even though Darby isn't my nickname). They don't understand what a middle name is so for one to use it is extremely difficult. I am going to have to reintroduce myself to the three classes I taught today. I don't know what I'm going to do about the other teachers because they always call me Darby (since they're all from Canada or Australia). Sheesh, what a mess!

Yelling. Chinese people seem to yell a lot. They'll either be yelling on the phone or yelling in an argument or even the people who come in the ambulance will be yelling for someone to tell them what's going on. It is very strange for me to have so many people always yelling in Chinese and not all of them being angry. I feel like Americans don't yell nearly as much as people do from China. I can not understand them very well when they yell and they seem to do it a lot, it really scares you. I'm always thinking "is everything okay?" And then it's something stupid that they're yelling about. But sometimes they are having an argument. It's definitely odd.

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