TGI Friday

---

Last night was pretty fun; we went to Ladies’ night in Lan Kwai Fong and drank far too many free cosmopolitans and vodka mixers so today wasn’t the most pleasant! Francis claims that teaching is the best hangover cure, I strongly disagree! I woke up this morning 5 minutes before our bus was due to leave but I made it in time (not too surprising considering I did once manage to get ready for a May Ball in 10 minutes), I was fine by most people’s standards, they had been to an all you can drink place which had only cost $120 (about £10) and were hence in a much worse state that I was. Thankfully this was the final day of teaching their stupid maths lessons, I thought it would be pretty simple, all I had to do was put on a half an hour YouTube clip (Donald Duck in Mathland in case you’re interested) and get them to answer questions on it at the end. Unfortunately the lesson was not quite so simple; my projector didn’t work so I was moved to a different classroom where once again they couldn’t get the projector to work, I was then moved again…after dragging the pupils around 4 different classrooms I was beginning to feel like the Pied Piper and agreed with the apologetic school teachers that I would just make up my own maths lesson (no more stupid word searches). I managed to fill time with my own class playing my educational version of ring of fire, for some bizarre reason they absolutely love it!



Lunch was quite hectic trying to sort music for the plays and deciding whether or not food was going to make me feel worse – it didn’t. The afternoon was filled with drama rehearsals and plays. Our rehearsals went brilliantly but when it came to our actual performance one girl, who I’d spent the whole week telling to be quiet, decided to sabotage my<span> (the classes own work of course) play and made a barrier with her huge arms to stop the others going on to the stage, I was so annoyed! Once I had finished giving her evils glares and got the class onto the stage, the play went really well; I did my usual trick of bribing two girls into singing just to fill up a bit of time, their ball room dancing was also pretty sweet (even if I did make one of the girl’s cry went I told her she’d have to partner a boy) and the two Apples played the piano very well. All the plays this week were amazing: we had an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes, a Bollywood dance, a version of the Wizard of Oz and “Finderella”, however the best one had to be Francesca’s adaptation of Grease which was really amazing especially considering how ill she has been and I’m pretty impressed she managed to get the boys and girls to stand within one metre of each other let alone act out a love scene.



We had a repeat of last week’s gift shenanigans and I was glad to be reunited with my purple cushion cover (perfect birthday present for my mum right?), we also had a gift for the teachers in the form of three coffee mugs; we were told we had to replace the ones that we<span> had used from the staffroom – heaven forbid they may catch our English germs even after the cups had been thoroughly washed. Embarrassingly I was able to provide the cheesy music for the closing party, Justin Beiber, Lady Gaga, Kesha, you name it, I will most likely have it on my laptop (I like to pretend this is due to sharing music with my younger sisters). <span> The leaving party wasn’t quite as fun the second time round, I think this is probably because I’ve now learnt that it’s so much better not to try and bond with the kids and I think this is the first week where I haven’t succeeded in getting the troublemakers on my side but I have enjoyed just shouting at them instead! There were nowhere near as many photos this week and this time I didn’t feel like a celebrity trying to avoid the paparazzi! Now I’m off to play doctor and give out tablets (spot the pharmacists’ daughter) to the worst victims of last night’s drinking and ignore my five new Facebook friend requests from people with Cantonese names who I never even taught but<span> I’ll leave you with a few inspirational quotes from the cheesy posters at Lai King Catholic Secondary School:



“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”

“You’ll never succeed if you don’t start.”

“You can always be a better person today than the one you were yesterday.”

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

“People are not limited by who they are but who they think they are not.”

“The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”



And one from Barack Obama for good measure’ “The countries who out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow.”

---