It’s been a while…..

---

It’s been a while since I wrote anything so I figured that I’d give all my family and friends (and any randomers who are reading feel free to comment) a bit of an update. As much as I am loving my time teaching (if you can call it that), I’m definitely feeling slightly homesick having not seen my family since May.



We’re currently teaching at Lai King Catholic Secondary School, we have been here for two weeks with a different set of children each week. My class last week we’re really nice and I was very happy that most of the girls wrote on their feedback forms that their favourite thing was their lovely, nice teacher Abi and one of them even bought me a pair of earrings. Although when I did have a conversation with another girl at lunchtime, I asked her whether she thought I’d be a good English teacher and she replied, “no, you’re too nice, you’re more of our friend than our teacher.” Maybe I should rule it out as a future career then! I also found out that she wants to become a pharmacist, I then stupidly told her that I’d worked in a pharmacy since I was her age (fourteen), I think she now believes that she can get a job in a pharmacy if she moves to England – oops!



My class were also completely in love with Francis, to the point that when one of the schoolteachers threw us a leaving party (complete with presenting us with gifts) she gave me a hug and cried and then refused to go and talk to Francis as she didn’t want him to see her crying! That week, we did the Cha Cha Slide as our dance (pretty easy to teach considering we’d already done it in my directions lesson, naturally), I’d given Francis’ stalker the microphone so that she could mime the DJ parts but instead she shouted, “this dance is for you Francis!” I was so embarrassed! I suppose it beats the time earlier in the week when they made a play about his secret girlfriend which was apparently me and then I decided to play along and pretend it was true, at which point they refused to speak to me. I never had the heart to tell them that he’s gay which is probably a good thing considering one of the laws for a new planet they came up with in another lesson was;” make all the gay people wear a sign to warn people so they can stay away!”



This week is a very different experience; we have to teach a bridging course to the primary children coming in to year 7, this means that we have to teach courses in English, Maths and Science. The specified hand outs seem incredibly boring, I felt extremely guilty giving them yet another word search today although because they are only given the words in Chinese characters and have to translate them, I feel I have managed to use my mark scheme to trick them into believing that I can understand Cantonese (I do now know how to write concave and convex, those two essential words.)



I think we’re all still managing to have fun despite the rubbish lesson plans that we have to follow this week; Marika is doing all the science lessons in a rap theme which is quite jokes- “when I say Bunsen you say burner, Bunsen…” you get the idea. The fashion show on Monday went really well, my class made an amazing dress out of a bin bag and we’ve actually kept it for one of the girls to wear on a night out! Another amusing moment was when Marika sat on class D’s bride to test it’s strength and all the balloons popped making her <span> jump up and screech and all the kids were in hysterics! Today my basket beanbag (a variation on basketball) round in the OSCA challenge went down really well and I managed to successfully get the beanbag in the box every demonstration which I was quite proud of although I did accidently say that Usain Bolt ran for the USA. <span> Tomorrow we get to watch everyone’s plays again, I have two Apples playing the piano and there will be a Fish on stage…

---