September is the BEST month!
Trip Start
Aug 24, 2008
1
3
13
Trip End
Jul 2009
Shijiazhuang,
China
Monday, September 15, 2008
So in our 2nd week in China, the three of us started teaching. Originally, I was supposed to teach almost the oldest students and the day night before my first day I found out that I was teaching the second youngest students. So Alissa has the youngest (7th grade), I have 8th grade and Willie has the sophomores in college. The first week of class was spent introducing ourselves and doing an ice-breaker type game with the students...and giving them English names if they didn't have one. So I started talking about myself...I have a mom, dad, dog, and on older brother named Drew. When I said the name Drew, the room broke out in a loud laughter that the students were trying to cover up. So I asked a student why people were laughing and she stood up very politely and said "Drew means pee." Which is only what I thought she said for like a week until I finally found out that she really said "pig" and her pronunciation was just terrible
students singing on Teachers' Day
. So I'm really sorry to disappoint you, Drew, you are not a bodliy fluid like I thought, just a smelly fat non kosher animal! So little by little we are all learning some Chinese. Each class has about 60 -70 students in a small room whose only form of air conditioning is 4 small fans that look like they are tied to the ceiling. There is no reason to shower before school and get ready because you will need another one right after your first class. My students are pretty immature for 8th graders and some of them can be naughty but I think that they are just talkative and are so excited to have an American as a teacher. We will loose our luster maybe and the students will be a little more calm. We each teach 2 classes in the morning and 2 classes in the afternoon, so we have a lunch break from 11:10- 2:40! Not a bad 3 1/2 hour break. We joined an awesome gym within walking distance so we can easily go there during that time. But if we don't work out, we eat awesome street food and read or play Nintendo DS. We are living the life. We are finding more and more food that we like to eat at the market. They have anything form we think chicken sandwiches, to noodles, to like an egg and carrot english muffin thing that is delicious. Everything costs less that 3 yuan which is maybe 40 cents. So if any of you guys come to visit maybe I can take you out to dinner... on me
Traditional Chinese singing
! Our second week of teaching was much more fun and comfortable; we knew the faculty better, the students had already met us, and we had already established our room rules...so now we could have fun. Basically our teaching is supplementary to the students' other English class. We are mearly here to interact with the students, play games with them, teach them American culture, and converse...and make them love English. That is what a lot of teachers have told me... make the students LOVE English! i don't exactly know how to force that love, but I made it one of my 4 classroom rules so I thought that was a start. The second week, my students were reviewing the body parts and learning about sicknesses so I taught them how to play Simon Says and gave each classes' winner a Drake pencil. They are so bright and caught on really fast. The most amusing part was when I had some students try to be "Simon" and give the instructions...they were really funny and some were really good. I didn't know what body part they were saying unless i was watching them so i reallllllly need to work on their pronunciation! I also taught them the "Head, shoulders, knees and toes" song and made the naughty kids come up and do it for the rest of the class! Maybe that will teach them a lesson.
Of, I forgot to mention some of the hilarious English names that the students chose
My students on Teachers' Day
. I will combine the students from all of our classes and give you a brief list of the ones that I remember!Kobe
Tracy McGrady
Superman
Batman
Spiderman
Chopin
Bach
Darkness
Lucifer
River
Object
Girls names Jeremy
Willie gave a girl a boy name because he thought she was a boy!
David Beckham
Harry Potter
Lucy
June
Lily
In China, all of the schools celebrate a "Teachers' Day." On this day the students will give presents, flowers, and cards to the teachers
More singing
. Also on teacher's day the students put on a sort of talent show to show their appreciation to their teachers and of course we had to do a performance. We performed "The Princess Pat" which is a song that I learned in girl scout camp that I never forgot. It is a long song too with a lot of actions. So Willie, Alissa, 10 of my students, and i had to perform in from of most of the school a song from girl scout camp...my life is coming full circle. And later we were interviewed by a tv station about how much we loved teacher's day. We all got interviewed but later found out from some students who watched it that only Alissa and I were on the news! Sorry Willie! We are getting a disk copy of the news report so I will add it to the blog as as soon as a get it. The student performances were really interesting. They are really talented in singing, dancing, and playing musical instruments. I have included many pictures and videos at the end of this blog so you can see for yourself. We also spoke some Chinese before our performance! We all had a sentence and said: 1. (Willie) "Today is Teachers' Day 2. (Alissa) "We are teachers" 3. (Me) "Today is our day" We had to stop after every sentence because the students were laughing, but i am proud of us for trying. We are taking Chinese lessons from Helen two times a week and it basically took us one whole class to learn those three sentences
Teachers' day Celebration
! I bought a volleyball in China! And have made Willie play with me on the play ground. Willie plays basketball with the boys but i don't think I am really at the level of playing with the high school team...so I'll stick to volleyball. We did play soccer with a huge group of boys. I was the only girl and I felt like I was in JSA (Jacksonville Soccer Ass.) all over again. Boys are STILL ball hogs and they are afraid of playing rough with a girl. So I had to go out of my way to even get the ball. By the end people were passing to me though. It was an awesome workout and my hamstrings have hurt for 3 days now.
We have been hanging out with a lot of other foreigners. I think that's what happens anywhere. We used to always think at Drake that the foreign kids would only hang out with each other, but you find a comfort in being with others who are different. We have hung out with a lot of people from Australia, UK, Ethiopia, India...and China. We have this one super friend who is Chinese and is getting his masters in English named Jake. He has been our knight in shining armor here. He has shown us around, taken us to restaurants, helped us talk to cab drivers, and has given us an insight on this city that I would have never known. He was born in this city and know it very well
Our view from the temple
. Let's see...what have we done? We have gone to a karaoke bar, eaten at a hot pot restaurant (kinda like a spicy fondu place), eaten at an out door chinese bbq place, gone to an amusement park/ botanical garden, walked around a few beautiful parks, and more that I'm sure I just can't remember now. I either wouldn't have know about most of these places until much later in the year or at all if Jake was not our friend! We all feel really lucky and we all want him to come to America so we can return the favor. Jake also wants to open his own restaurant in the city and sell sub sandwiches like subway because he loves them and there is NOTHING around here like that. We were also in the newspaper this week! We were in the paper because they wanted to know about what we knew about a holiday in China called Mid Autumn Festival. Apparently it is the 2nd most important holiday in China and we only found out about it from Helen. It is a holiday where people basically celebrate the moon and the upcoming harvest. The reporters asked us if we had any holiday that was similar so we said that maybe Thanksgiving could be. Then they kept asking if we have a holiday where we look at the moon or celebrate the moon...so I opened my dumb mouth and just said that we have a moon called the harvest moon. I think I only know this because I grew up on a farm. It is the moon that comes out in October or November that is really big, orange, and low to the ground
Traditional Chinese Singing
. Anyway, that is really all I said about it. Then we see our picture in the paper and i have Helen translate what the article says. The article had this huge section that talked about how my father is a farmer and we celebrate the harvest moon. In October or November, we will sing and dance under the harvest moon!!! WHAT...what is so wrong. It makes us sound like a cultish tribe! Whatever, I'm sure someone somewhere in America does that so it might not be that completely untrue! We celebrated the Mid Autumn Festival by going to a part about an hour away from our city. A tv station put on this party and invited our school basically because they knew the foreigners would come. When we were waiting for the bus we met a 10 year old boy named James who had the best English that I have heard since I've been here, besides Jake's. We started talking to James and from that moment at 3pm until 11pm we were inseperable. He sat by my on the bus, at dinner, on the bus on the way back. His mother should have paid us baby sitting fees because I'm sure his mother was glad to get rid of him for a while because he did not stop talking until we left at the end of the night. We went into the mountains outside the city and first went to a temple for some Buda and some other teachers/gods...we really didn't understand the Chinese that the monk was speaking! And James had too short of an attention span to translate everything for me so I would only get some bits and pieces
1-Traditional Chinese Singing
. I guess people like going to the temples on Holidays and making wishes for their futures. They light incense and kneel before some of the statues. The different statues are for the different gods in charge of different departments. God of money...god of health and so on. We then went to the party. It was an outdoor event that was held next to a lake called Dragon Lake. The setup was beautiful with tables full of coke and beer, bright red Chinese lanterns hanging from the roof, and a buffet style serving area in the back with a stage for performances in the front. The food consisted of many dishes that I didn't know...so I would ask James. While I had this spicy and boney piece of meat in my mouth I asked James what it was. His response was "rabbit's head." So we can now cross that food of our list of crazy shit! They had noodles, rice dumplings, cookies, rice, sausage which tasted like salami, and moon cakes. Moon cakes are the traditional cake of the Mid Autumn Festival. it is a small cake that has an inside like fruit cake meets gummy bear meets a Fig Newton. After dinner came the performances. This is where it gets good. So a few days before the party, Helen told us that we have to perform a dance or a a song that represents America. If you have ever met me or Willie you know that we CANNOT sing...and Alissa is not good either. So we decide that we will perform a country western line dance...what can be more American, right!? We bring our friends Josh and Billie to the party because the more foreigners, the better; and all perform a line dance to the Billy Ray Cyrus song "Achy Breaky Heart!" There are people performing traditional Chinese opera songs, the Beijing orchestra is there, girls are playing beautiful traditional instruments..
2-Traditional Chinese Singing
. and we danced to "Achy Breaky Heart." Which one is out of place? But everyone seemed to like it because they were clapping along and small children ran up and gave us apples while we performed which is a sign of appreciation! We have all really learned to suck up our pride here and keep telling ourselves that we are never going to meet these people again, so we might as well act like fools! If they want a show, they will get one! The Mid Autumn Festival was my favorite day so far in China and I will have amazing memories from that party for the rest of my life...so it was well worth it! I will end here even though i could continue for hours because we only have one computer between the 3 of us due to some electrical problems in our apt but we are figuring it out. I have included many photos and videos at the end of this so check it out!
