Advertisement
Published: December 24th 2009
It’s time for another Christmas in China!
To be honest, I’ve been more down about being so far from home for Christmas than I was last year. I need to get used to it, because I plan to continue teaching English overseas for as long as possible, and that means I still have several years to go before I’ll be able to spend a holiday at home.
Luckily, yesterday was a very good day. I brought in Christmas treats for all of my two hundred and fifty students. The hardest part was finding enough of anything, and I ended up getting different gifts for each of my classes. In one class all of the students got new erasers, in two they all got pencils, and in two they all got cookies. The funniest reaction was in one of my grade two classes, where the students all wanted to take home the cookie wrappers so that they could have them to smell later. In my third grade class we had a Christmas party, and re-wrote the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” together, because we’ve been doing ordinal numbers recently, and also to teach the past tense of “to give”.
I also exchanged gifts with my co-teachers. One of them gave me an entire cake, and another one gave me some chocolates. Some of my students gave me chocolate too, so I have no shortage of holiday sweets.
In the evening, the school took all of the foreign teachers out for a Christmas dinner. It was a typical Chinese banquet, with more dishes than anyone could count, and also a large amount of free wine and beer. One thing about this school is that it really does go out of its way to do nice things for its foreign teaching staff.
Since I never write in this blog, I should also go through some other updates before I log out. I’ve had to do a lot of show lessons lately, cumulating in one big one that I had to do in front of all of the teachers and administrators at the school. Luckily, it went fairly well. The theme of the lesson was making telephone calls. On one level I enjoy show lessons in a strange way, because they remind me of when I used to do theatre in high school and college. However, they’re a lot of work, and I hope I don’t have to do any more for a long time, because my schedule is busy enough without them.
I’m taking Chinese classes twice a week now. They’re provided for free by the city of Wuhan. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned them before. Other than the obvious benefit of improving my Chinese, I think the classes are good for me because they remind me of what it’s like to be a language student, so I can identify better with my own students.
My long holiday is beginning at the end of January this year, and going on through February. That’s a month later than it did last year. The only thing that’s set in stone is that I’m going back to the Keats School in Kunming, this time for three weeks. Kunming remains my favorite big city in China, even after all of the others I’ve seen, and Keats school left me with a really good impression last year. I’m strange in that I find the idea of studying Chinese for four hours a day relaxing. I worry often that even after nearly a year and a half of living in China, my Chinese isn’t as good as I want it to be, but I figure I enjoy studying it, and I still have lots of time to improve. Before coming to China I figured I would go to a new country and become fluent in the language every year, but by now I’ve realized that’s impossible, and plan to concentrate my efforts on learning Chinese (and not forgetting all of my German) for the time being. I also decided to take some Tai Chi classes at the Keats school this year, just for something different (Note to concerned family members: I promise not to start practicing Tai Chi in the front yard, on rocks in front of the ocean, or in other embarrassing locations.)
And that’s all! Merry Christmas to everyone back in the states.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.203s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 10; qc: 51; dbt: 0.1206s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
mumsisdaughter
non-member comment
Season's Greetings
Do you get snow? We haven't had proper sticking- to- the- ground- for- more- than- a- day snow for about 18 years, in this part of the UK, but we have this year. It started a week ago and, although not very deep, shows no sign of melting away. Real White Christmas! All the best for 2010 (What's that in Chinese years?) Kath xx