Characters and K8

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I'm losing some of my motivation. It's interesting at least I can see and understand it instead of just losing it and not knowing why. I'm not losing it in everything just two main things that I've had a hard time getting motivation to do in the first place. The first of these is Chinese characters. Learning Chinese characters is a real bitch for me. After all it has nothing to do with what I'm good at. I'm good at listening and speaking and memorizing something for a short time before my ear and my mouth catch up with my brain. After that I still pretty much suck at memorization. And unfortunately that's all that learning characters is - memorization. It has nothing to do with how we speak or listen to Chinese, after all it's just like memorizing a picture for something only the word itself doesn't look quite like that picture, sometimes it doesn't look like that picture at all. It is something that I've struggled with. I'll go through times when I'm really motivated to learn characters and really want to be literate and then other times when I really couldn't care less. After all who cares about being literate in one language, I've got three others that I can still read no problem. I can always revert back to those. It does get to me a little bit when there are lines and lines of book stalls on the streets and I have to pass them without even looking once because I can't read them but other than that it doesn't really matter. Street signs? I've never really even paid attention to them in the US besides knowing generally where I am which I definitely already do here. Store signs? I've already gotten used to the idea of looking in a shop instead of at the sign to see what kind of shop it is and I can detect some signs well enough to be able to tell if it's a restaurant or not. Advertisements? I've never really cared or done anything about them anyways. So I guess if I want to learn characters I'll have to wait until my motivation comes back. In the meantime I can enjoy my time learning Cantonese and more Mandarin (although the learning on the Mandarin goes slow recently as I've hit a point where there is already a lot I know). After all those are what I'm good at. I'm not memorizing the Cantonese every word of it I learn I hear almost every day from Camillo and it just helps me understand what he's saying more. It's funny, people always think I'm good at memorizing words because they can tell me a word in Mandarin and I can say it back to them a few minutes later but that's just because it gets stored somewhere in my brain and I end up hearing it so many more times that I understand it. For some reason that's different than memorizing.

K8. What should I do about my K8. It's really an age level that I can't seem to get to right now. I know I said that before about K6 but I've figured out how to work with K6. My first "semester" here I had a K6 kid that I really didn't know how to work with named Peter. Now he's in my K7 class. Yesterday I heard that he was sitting in on Cat's K7 class so I went into the class. He was sitting leaning over talking to some other boys as it was break time so I walked up to him and gave him a light punch on the shoulder. He turned around and as soon as he saw it was me he had a big smile on his face. "Hey!" he said in English. We had a little conversation about why he had missed my class and I went off to talk to some of the other teachers. Sometimes all it takes is a bit of understanding for some of your kids and then you get along really well with them. Peter and I are great friends now even though it took a lot of my "hating" him in the beginning. I really did dread my K6 class first semester because of him. But now I really enjoy my K7 class because I can rely on him to make it entertaining and can keep him under control. He has learned to fear me just like any student should fear their teacher, in that respectful way. My K6 is some of my best friends too because I've also worked with them since the first semester. They even wrote some cards for my mother when they knew I was going home to visit her in the hospital. My K3 is really insane because they have so much energy but I've learned what kind of activities they can and can't do and am really good at working with those. So much so in fact that I no longer need to spend a lot of time getting together their lesson plan. My K4 is mostly my old kids so I know what they like and it's also easy to plan for them. I love my K2's, they're so adorable and really easy to work with. It was pretty comical yesterday in K2 because three of the boys were playing with their bottles as swords during the break and one of the bottles burst open and got them wet with water. They immediately got yelled at by the cleaner because she had to clean it up and got yelled at a bit by my assistant Chinese teacher Helen. So they started tearing up a bit, not actually crying, and ended up humphing towards their own corners of the room for a bit of the beginning of class. However once we started playing games they were back messing around with each other. I love them. But K8 I just don't know what to do with. They're at a level where I don't really know what games they would like to play or what would even help them with their current English level. Maybe I just need to stick with it until some of the kids I used to teach get to the K8 level and then I'll be saying how easy K8 is. Who knows. Right now it's just difficult for me.

Visited Countries Map


This is a map of all the countries I've visited. Just to show you how much of the world is left for exploration.

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