Bats in the belfry
Whew another week has gone by... There have been some interesting moments this week. On Tuesday evening, I had my worst class EVER...
It started of quite well actually, but I didn't have a teacher helper, and by the end of the class the kids were going wild... We were doing "my body" and some of the boys felt they needed to be ah.. physiologically accurate in their pictures. I took a really strict approach to the first boy that did this, but it didn't really work.... by the end I was feeling rather frustrated with the class, and decided it wasn't worth it to try and get them through any more activities. As I was trying to get their attention back from the activity they were finishing, a bat flew into the classroom. It started flying wildly in circles.. kind of swooping up and dowoon. Now, I was slightly terrified, but tried to stay calm, ducking when it came past my head, the girls were all ducking and a few were screaming. The boys started chasing it and trying to hit it with their notebooks... it was really horrible, i didn't know what to do, and couldn't really communicate with them.. anyways, i dismissed them and then left, i was almost in tears by that point. it was such bad night! I guess that would be called, according to my textbooks, a "lesson breakdown"
Anyways, classes continued at my elementary schools and jr. highs for the rest of the week, there was the rowdy Yuli Elementary class, the half dead San Min class (seriously I had the attention of maybe 8 out of 33 students. I was teaching actions and started describing the classroom like this "There is a big room with many people sitting in it. There is someone talking at the front of the room. Two people are sleeping. One person is listening to music. Two people are hitting each other. Two people are reading comic books." it was all true of my class! ) Fortunately after that I got to teach my wonderful, lovely, favorite Jr. High class who pretend to be interested, even if they're not, participate, and answers question. I'm not sure why they're different from all my other jr. high classes, but man the students are just amazing, i love them! Anyways, on Thursday night we found out that Friday would be our last class at Yu Dong, and that we only had an hour with them (instead of 4 more hours of class left). That was actually kind of a relief, but then we had to plan our "last day" with them, which we always try to make a little more fun. This week we will have our last class at 3 more schools.
Thursday evening we had dinner with some of our adult students, which was so much fun! I'm really happy that we got to hang out with them a little. We're planning to go see the day lilies sometime in the future.
On Saturday there was kind of an all-day church event. The organization here has been building a new centre (kind of like a community/youth centre) and in the morning they had an opening ceremony. Fortunately we were free to wander around a bit, and so didn't have to sit in the sun for an hour and a half listening to Chinese speeches. One of the cool things is that they also made this huge climbing wall, and so we got to see a bunch of the teens scale the wall for the first time. In the afternoon was kind of like a big church service, the highlight of which was seeing a lot of people we know and some we haven't seen before. I also saw a couple of my Jr. High students and found out that they're Christians.
Sunday morning, we went to Grace Church, so great! We ambitiously decided to ride our bikes to Nanan and then hike to the waterfall (which I had my doubts about us acomplishing, but we made it), which I'm really glad we did. The waterfall (pubu) is really beautiful! So anyways, yesterday we rode our bikes 18km and hiked 8km. Whew!
It started of quite well actually, but I didn't have a teacher helper, and by the end of the class the kids were going wild... We were doing "my body" and some of the boys felt they needed to be ah.. physiologically accurate in their pictures. I took a really strict approach to the first boy that did this, but it didn't really work.... by the end I was feeling rather frustrated with the class, and decided it wasn't worth it to try and get them through any more activities. As I was trying to get their attention back from the activity they were finishing, a bat flew into the classroom. It started flying wildly in circles.. kind of swooping up and dowoon. Now, I was slightly terrified, but tried to stay calm, ducking when it came past my head, the girls were all ducking and a few were screaming. The boys started chasing it and trying to hit it with their notebooks... it was really horrible, i didn't know what to do, and couldn't really communicate with them.. anyways, i dismissed them and then left, i was almost in tears by that point. it was such bad night! I guess that would be called, according to my textbooks, a "lesson breakdown"
Anyways, classes continued at my elementary schools and jr. highs for the rest of the week, there was the rowdy Yuli Elementary class, the half dead San Min class (seriously I had the attention of maybe 8 out of 33 students. I was teaching actions and started describing the classroom like this "There is a big room with many people sitting in it. There is someone talking at the front of the room. Two people are sleeping. One person is listening to music. Two people are hitting each other. Two people are reading comic books." it was all true of my class! ) Fortunately after that I got to teach my wonderful, lovely, favorite Jr. High class who pretend to be interested, even if they're not, participate, and answers question. I'm not sure why they're different from all my other jr. high classes, but man the students are just amazing, i love them! Anyways, on Thursday night we found out that Friday would be our last class at Yu Dong, and that we only had an hour with them (instead of 4 more hours of class left). That was actually kind of a relief, but then we had to plan our "last day" with them, which we always try to make a little more fun. This week we will have our last class at 3 more schools.
Thursday evening we had dinner with some of our adult students, which was so much fun! I'm really happy that we got to hang out with them a little. We're planning to go see the day lilies sometime in the future.
On Saturday there was kind of an all-day church event. The organization here has been building a new centre (kind of like a community/youth centre) and in the morning they had an opening ceremony. Fortunately we were free to wander around a bit, and so didn't have to sit in the sun for an hour and a half listening to Chinese speeches. One of the cool things is that they also made this huge climbing wall, and so we got to see a bunch of the teens scale the wall for the first time. In the afternoon was kind of like a big church service, the highlight of which was seeing a lot of people we know and some we haven't seen before. I also saw a couple of my Jr. High students and found out that they're Christians.
Sunday morning, we went to Grace Church, so great! We ambitiously decided to ride our bikes to Nanan and then hike to the waterfall (which I had my doubts about us acomplishing, but we made it), which I'm really glad we did. The waterfall (pubu) is really beautiful! So anyways, yesterday we rode our bikes 18km and hiked 8km. Whew!
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