Tiring Weekend

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"I'm never having a kid in my life" Kelvin complains to me as he walks into the teacher's lounge on Saturday afternoon. That's what the weekends feel like to us. Working 7 hours in a row with a total of around 50 students definitely makes one feel like that. I've noticed myself many a time saying (out loud or to myself) "I have no idea how a teacher could ever possibly have kids." And it's true! I was thinking the other day, if I had some pets, a significant other and a job as a teacher my life would be completed successfully as there would be nothing else I would need. There's nothing wrong with kids. Not a day goes by when I regret working with kids. However, there are days that go by when I regret working the kind of hours I work (especially on the weekends) and when I regret having certain classes. Saturday I taught my once a week K6 class. My Chinese teacher and I have been having an awful time with both discipline and their English level. We've complained to the proper people a couple of times and nothing was yet to be done. Fortunately on Saturday Nancy came in and sat in on the class and it was almost as if I were simply teaching another slow class. It was crazy. I had been wracking my brain all day for a way to teach them properly and then there was no problem at all almost!

Today I had my K8 class - which is always a joy to teach although sometimes I think the class tries to teach them too much at once with both new vocabulary, sentence structures and new grammar ideas. Then I had a break before I taught my K2's. They really are absolutely adorable. We played a couple different review games - Wusiqi (also known as Tic-tac-toe), Typhoon and a review game for a recent unit. At one point I noticed Jack in almost visible pain in the back and I motioned to my assistant teacher. She asked him what was wrong and he said that he really had to use the bathroom. That was fairly humorous to me (why he didn't just get up and ask) but he's a really sweet kid so I'm not really surprised. Jonny asked me if he could "Go see John" again. Last time he did that was on Wednesday and when he did I told him "say that again, I don't think Helen (my assistant teacher) can understand you". And sure enough she didn't! What a smart little kid! He seems to have a slight speech impediment but I think it's more from being nervous than from anything else, or simply stumbling on the pronunciation, because he doesn't do it in Chinese.

I taught my twice a week K6's in the afternoon. As I've taught them before and the majority of them are really smart and good at picking things up I have to raise the bar on their English quite a bit. Unfortunately as I looked at the K6 test which they are to have on Wednesday I realized that it's a bit ridiculous. They're being taught on information they learned in K4, not on what I've been testing them on in class.

Will and I have had a very interesting relationship. She's my tutoring student that I've taught for a long time now. At first when I taught her I thought she was a real pain in the neck because I would ask her something and she would spit it right back at me. "What's gravity?" "Gravity is gravity." "No. What's gravity?" "Gravity is ... weell ... something on Earth." "Not exactly, what is it?" It would go on like this for quite a while. And I ended up constantly looking at my watch to see what time it was and time would go by really slowly. But then (again) I found out that it was the book. So we approached the book in a different way and it started working a lot better. Every now and then we'd have a fairly intense conversation about something. At the beginning of this semester - in the beginning of March. She told her mom (who told the school) that she was really getting to like working with me. Two weeks ago I was trying to do some review with her on vocabulary and she was reverting to her old way of dealing with vocabulary so I decided to play Pictionary with her. Then again last week I decided to play Risk with her. So this week we sat down and just made two lists and talked about them for the hour and a half. Once I looked down at my watch time was up (and of course same with playing a game). The first list had Pictionary on one side and Risk on the other. We came up with the things which the two games taught a person, the school subjects which they represented, and the way they taught a person to behave. Then at the bottom was a list with China on one hand and America on the other. We talked about why games are used in America and not in China to teach the same things both countries are trying to teach. We talked about how one gets a job in both countries - by taking tests here and through competition in the states. Then we talked about right now and how both countries creativity was doing as well as which country might be the most creative right now - which we thought may be Japan.

Camillo had a pretty big day today and was in a fairly strange mood when I finally saw him playing pool at 8pm. Today he cut three superstars hair - winners of different world and chinese beauty pageants. He (or so he said) wanted to get home fast to show me pictures of them so he practically ran from one place to another with me behind him until he got home. Then Eason and Xiao Jiang were really picky about things and how relaxed I was acting while they cooked (even though they wouldn't let me do anything about the cooking). Camillo decided to take the time to show me the pictures. They're pretty but not THAT pretty. In the end I ate with the three of them and then had a tickle fight with Camillo before leaving to go home.

Happy Easter! I'd nearly forgotten about it as they don't celebrate it here. Now it's time to go to bed as I'm exhausted.

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