Me and My Class

So teaching is actually over now. After 5 days of teaching, I'm exhausted, but I still want to tell you about it. Since I didn't have time to blog much while I was busy preparing lessons and catering to all the school's requirements, I'll be recapping everything for you. Over the past week I've grown pretty close to my class--there are kids in there so cute you just want to eat them. Even the naughty ones tend to be quite endearing. I told my mom I didn't think I'd have kids. Now I know I won't--I'll just adopt a Chinese one.

Generally speaking, we teach 3-5 hours of class a day. It's kind of tough coming up with 3-5 hours worth of new material every day...especially when you're doing it on the fly--we had no warning beforehand how it was going to work out. Thus, my lessons usually start out with some jumping jacks and light exercise to wake the kids up, then we do a lesson using Power Point--these have included animals, colors, foods, American holidays and landmarks, etc., and then we finish up with a game (or two).

One particular time of madness came on the first night. The kids acted like they were on speed or something. I made the terrible mistake of playing "I Like...", which is where all the students mingle together and say the following convo: A: Hello; B: Hello; A: Do you like ice cream?; B: Yes, I do!, do you like pizza?; A: No I don't!; B: Thank you; A: Goodbye. Each student had to use all four items that were given (pizza and ice cream would be two of them). Now imagine that you've got 23 students enclosed in a circle of desks that's 1/3 the size of the class room. Now realize that they're being timed to see if they can beat their score. It was nuts. Kids were climbing on each other, screaming, choking each other, and just laughing nonsensically. We only played one round. So much for "mingling". After that we went outside and played Red Rover, Red Rover. They really got into it--and no, I didn't get put into the stew pot.

There's a couple kids I especially like. Oscar is my favorite (he's in the second pic sitting at the desk). He's one of the smartest kids in the class, he has the best English out of any of them (he once rattled off over 10 NBA players when I asked for example--I had to cut him off), and I can tell he's not only popular, but he's also the leader of the class. Him and his friends once saw me running and took off to catch me...no one did, but Oscar stuck with me the longest--that earned points in my book.

Daron--he was trouble in class, but in the end he ended up being pretty cool. He wanted me to call him Kobe Bryant, and he even made his name tag as Kobe Bryant. He was kind of the class clown, always trying to tell me what I should do (you can see an example of this in the 3rd picture) or trick me into giving him chocolate (on the third day of teaching I started using chocolate as a bribe...and it worked pretty well).

Kobe and Oscar were in a row with William (he's in the 2nd pic helping Oscar) and the two James's. The two James's and Daron looked really similar, and those 3 along with Oscar and William were my trouble makers. They were also the ones I got to know the best and the ones I ended up doing a little performance with...I'll get to that later...

That last pic (clockwise) is of Daron, Natalie, Lily, and Lucy when we were playing an Olympic memorization game. Daron tried to cheat by looking at books in the class. Lucy was one of my favorites--good English, but an even harder worker.