School on a Saturday?!

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Leaving LSE on Saturday was very different to leaving Tadpoles, Having acted as camp manager for the first few days I hadn’t seen the pupils very much. Nevertheless, there was still the obsessive photo taking at the end of the closing ceremony and one girl even wrote me a letter, another said I’m going to miss you sporty girl, I’m not quite sure how running the length of the hall in a relay competition and teaching a lesson based on the Olympics and sport warranted me this nickname but hey I guess that’s Chinese kids for you!



The day itself was rather stressful; it didn’t get off to the best of starts when I came downstairs and the security woman refused to let me leave the building as I’d misplaced my key card (it was somewhere on my desk but locating it amongst all my paper was a bit of an issue!) She then gestured that I must pay $20, I reluctantly handed over the money expecting her to let me through the turnstile, she didn’t. She had essentially charged me $20 to go back up in the lift, get my lovely (and extremely tolerant of my mess) Ophelia to let me back in so that I could find my card and let me back out the building. Needless to say, this made me really angry and a “Cantoglish” argument ensued (she was shouting at me in Cantonese and I was shouting back in English). After a lot of shouting and me waving my purse in her face, she finally threw my $20 back at me whilst shouting something in Cantonese. At this point I realised that I’d have to see her every day for the next three weeks , I wimped out and apologised profusely in my best Cantonese.



At school (we had to work on Saturday due to losing a day due to the typhoon), rehearsals for the plays were well under way, I ran round like Mr Chettle trying to set up music and microphones and yelling at people to get in the hall! I think my class hate me as I went in shouting at them for stealing the microphones when they’d just put them under the piano and I and I hadn’t seen them. From what I managed to see, the finally performances went quite well – even if some teachers were more interested in taking photos than controlling their class backstage leaving one poor TA to prompt the children, keep them quiet, sort the music and redistribute the microphones whilst I tried to stop them ruining my laptop and ear drums! Fortunately our dance to Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” went quite well, no one fell off the stage (always a bonus), maybe I should have put my least favourite kids on the end of the wheel (I’M JOKING, I PROMISE).



After the hectic morning, we had an equally hectic afternoon; Francis, Marika and I rushed to ARCH academy ( I was trying but failing to make them run) to help out with an Oxbridge application seminar. I think it was just the stress of the morning and lack of sleep but, when we arrived and were told that we were being taken for lunch at a Thai restaurant I actually wanted to scream – definitely felt like a twelve year old throwing a tantrum!



In the evening we arrived back at BU and watched the Olympic gymnastics on TV, I was quite jealous as this was one of the events that I had had tickets to see. I suppose six weeks teaching in Hong Kong and almost a month in Japan may just about make up for it right?

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