The one that shall not be named

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I didn’t get away without singing but fortunately my voice was still in tact for teaching this morning. As a general rule, due to harsh criticism from certain family members (fill in the blanks in case you weren’t sure C_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ and M_ _ _ _ _ _) , I only sing when in the shower or drunk but last night was definitely the exception that proves the rule! I was even quite flattered to be told that<span><span><span><span><span><span> I have a good voice<span> (they were probably taking the mick).<span>It was fun to get to spend time with the elusive residential crew and some of the other TAs, they were all really fun and gave me some great inspirational advice when I started on one of my usual rants about my future.



Despite only having one cocktail, getting the last MTR home, not being even remotely drunk when I went to bed and having a modest six and a half hours sleep, I still woke up (at 6.30am of course) with a horrific hangover – considering some people’s antics of the night before, I found this deeply unfair! I took it on the chin and giggled to myself as I watched the others emerge incredibly hungover (sunglasses in the stormy weather are always a give away), still completely hammered or undecided between the two! Having once been kindly dubbed (by girl A of course) “the most helpful person on OSC (apparently we lose the A when we get to Hong Kong), I took it upon myself to become team PA for the morning, obediently going to the canteen to buy everyone emergency coffee for the bus journey. I don’t think anybody felt quite so bad as one of our poor TAs who had woken up and forgotten the name of the other girl who had been taking care of her. The poor girl soldiered on through the day and I hope she’ll find comfort in reading that she wasn’t the only one to have to run out of the classroom during the course of the morning!



Following yesterday’s “trip to London lesson,” we made the natural progression onto “ a day trip to watch the Olympics”; I told a few white lies when I asked them to choose which sport they wanted to buy a ticket for – I figured that saying “you can ballot for as many tickets as you want and you’ll go and watch what you’re bloody well given, which will most likely be nothing!” would be slightly inappropriate, (not quite so bad as one of our other teachers who put on Jamie Oliver only to hear him say the F word for times in the first 30 seconds). I started the lesson with a YouTube (that famous London transport system) clip of<span> “binocular football” which they found hilarious (as did I)<span> and then filled the time at the end with my brand new, exciting, fun game “ring of English”-essentially ring of fire but every time they picked up a card they had to do a task related to a topic they had learnt in English which was dictated by the colour and number shown on the card. I particularly liked it when I gave them forfeits for breaking the ring – I told one boy to stand up and sing “I’m a little teapot” which he somehow managed to pronounce as “I’m a little pee pot” which I obviously found hilarious! The younger class came out with some howlers too; disturbingly, one girl kept on saying “killer” every time she had to name a job and the boy next to her was insistent on being a “cock” (cook).



Our class really excelled in drama and an extremely dedicated group of them had stayed in over lunchtime to choreograph a dance. I also managed to get the whole class involved in another dance that I choreographed for the end of the play that will hopefully be ace but I’ll let you know tomorrow.









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The afternoon event also went surprisingly well considering how awful everyone felt- I had to run “basketball” which involved throwing paper balls into boxes for 3 minutes and counting which team had scored the most. I think they really enjoyed it except for one class who I swear were just trying (and succeeding) to throw the balls at me.<span> Our class<span> (debatably) won the event overall, I feel my running may have rubbed off on them as they ran across the hall for the tiebreaker relay.<span> I’m also pretty impressed that they are all coming back in tomorrow (a Saturday) to perform the play for the rest of the school, one boy even told me he was happy we had to come in at the weekend as “Saturdays are boring anyway.”



On that note, I’m going to call it a night and hopefully a good sleep will shift this awful headache. Two teaching weeks down, three to go and four until I’m back in the UK- is it too early to put in a request for a roast dinner (minus the soy sauce)?

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