Week 4 -- Teaching a Slow Day

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Monday, August 9, 2010
It was a slow day teaching today. I got completely involved in the readings and I know that the students were bored. We did a reading on the role of women that Judy had suggested and I projected it on the screen...not a good idea. I know that readings on the screen are not a good idea but I thought ok it'll be a good follow up for the reading cloze we did on the traditional family last week. But it was not such a good idea and some people were falling asleep. Then we did holidays...no activity. So overall the day was pretty boring for them...and I ran overtime. I spoke too much and they were bored and well...it was one of those days.

Then in the afternoon the entire program of teachers was supposed to come here to the conference room at the hotel to see The Sound of Music. Now I really enjoyed it but these young girls were completely bored, I think. I don't know that they can appreciate Julie Andrews...and the music is definitely from a different era. I hadn't seen it in maybe 20 years so I enjoyed it...it's a great score...but overall I think today could have been better.

Tomorrow, the two volunteers from the States are going to present something about their universities. I hope that the teachers will be interested.

In the morning I will continue the presentation on American Holidays and then end the morning with a jeopardy game. I hope that they will be a bit more entertained by the entire endeavour! It's not easy to keep people entertained, day after day. It might be better just to stick with pronunciation.

The weather here has been wet the today and I think I hear the rain outside now. It's almost like the season has changed all of a sudden. It was steamy hot on Sunday after the rain on Saturday night but today was rather overcast and cool and it's been lightly raining throughout the day.

I'm almost at the end of my Starbucks coffee..just a couple of days left...but we'll be leaving on Friday morning so I hope I can last til then.

I've been stuck in my room this entire evening finishing up grading some papers for the online class that I've been teaching while here. It's been a struggle to maintain that course load at the same time that I'm teaching -- I've really had to stay focused but c'est la vie!

I made a slight break through with the Chinese on Sunday. I began to make some sentences with the few vocabulary words that I was picking up but today I have done nothing with Chinese so I feel that I've fallen back 2 paces for the 1 step forward that I had taken on Sunday. I would like to have some kind of audio to record one of my students pronouncing some of the Chinese in the children's books that I purchased. I would like to have that recording to help me continue.

It's already midnight here. I'm going to try to get to bed soon...

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