Please pass the air conditioning

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If I were back home, there would be a slight chill in the air at night. Leaves would be starting to turn. We'd be waiting for that one last warm weekend, knowing that snow could be upon us within a month.

Not here.

The past few days have had highs in the mid-90s, with dewpoints in the 70s, making for heat indexes of 105-110. And that's just in the shade.
Yet, I find myself walking the kilometer to dinner or lunch almost every day. Yes, the noodle place has no AC, either, but they do have nice fans. And then their kitchen heats up rather than my room. And with the heat, I can even more easily justify ice cream on the way home.

The week was good, generally speaking. I tested my kids all week, getting some surprisingly good results from some of my 7th graders and some disappointing results from some of my 9th graders. Roy reminds me that I need to remember this is a second language, and I am. But when I can answer the question in Chinese more thoroughly than some of them can in English... well, I'm just not willing to give out high marks for that. It's possible that they didnt' realize that the more they say the better their score. It never occured to me to explain that. But I can say without a doubt that many of my students feel quite strongly that, "National Day is my mother's birthday, and I am Chinese people and that's why it's important to me." Too bad it took me 2 classes to figure out that there really aren't a lot of mothers born on Oct 1, but that they were referring to their "motherland."

I started Chinese classes again. I'm retaing level 2 this term and will take 3 next term. My ego isn't thrilled, but I remember all too well what happened in high school with Spanish. By the time I had finished level 2, with a decent grade, I knew I hadn't learned as much as I should. Level 3 was horrible. Luckily, my teacher was a bit of a flake and I still managed to get a good grade. How big of a flake, you ask? She brought in the movie "El Cid" for us to watch in class and then would wander out of the room for large chunks of our blocked class period. One kid brought the remote from his home VCR and used it to rewind the movie a bit everytime she stepped out of the room. The movie lasted 2 weeks.
I switched to Japanese the next year.

Tomorrow I will go to the movies, and not just for the AC. With the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC film makers have been pouring out movie upon movie. Some of them are more factual and some of them have a love story slant. Candy, one of my Chinese friends, will be going with, so anything we don't understand we can always ask her to explain later. Then we'll go to dinner and laugh till we cry, and then I'll come home and wish I had finished my lesson planning already.

But in reality, it was too hot to think today.

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Comments

[Brooke K.]

I would send you our old A/C unit if I could! :) Sadly, we will soon not need it though, for us, it is still fairly 'hot' at 80 something.