2nd week of teaching -2 kids cried, 2 kids smiled...I'm even

• I made two kids cry this week
• I kind of feel sad but that’s mixed with the feeling that maybe I should be keeping track on the outside of my door like when WWII pilots would down enemy aircraft just to show kids that I mean business
• Both times were accidents and I definitely did not mean to make those kids cry because that’s not exactly a “culture of achievement” when instead of worrying about good grades you’re worried about Mr. Spencer doing something to make you tear up
• The first child was a complete accident making her cry
• So I kept getting random kids coming into my classroom who didn’t register at the start of the Teach for China summer camp we’re teaching so they missed out on that window but because they had friends here they just came to my class with their friends
• I didn’t think it was any big deal and I honestly thought that this first girl was officially registered and had just missed the first few days
• Well this girl who I gave the English name Jasmine to was misbehaving one day (She got the dreaded 3 X’s on the blackboard because she took words that were taped to the word wall and stuck them to my water bottle while she was supposed to be doing a group activity) and her punishment was to copy the day’s vocabulary 20 times and I had to call her parents
• Well I went to go look for her phone number on the class roster and it wasn’t there and I went to the TFC operations office and they had no idea who she was.
• So the next day when she came in like most of my students an hour early before class because they apparently have nothing better to do, I told her in my poor Chinese that, “You’re not my student so please go to room 316 to get things straightened out”
• I told her this outside the class far away from the children and she started to walk in the direction of the stairs toward the room but then all of a sudden she just broke down
• I tried to tell her that she could attend class but she ran into the girls’ bathroom and I couldn’t follow her in so I just thought that when she was done she’d come back but she never did and I couldn’t call her parents to invite her back because I don’t know who she actually is which makes me feel pretty bad because she was a good student who just happened to misbehave once.
• The second student I made cry was a little more understandable
• So we had a mid-term on Friday and I told everyone that they are not allowed to talk during the test or I will take their test away, tell them to leave, and call their parents
• Well this one kid who always talks in my class to begin with decided to test that and literally on the second question of the oral part where I’m looking directly at all the students and they can all see me looking at them, he screams something and I took his test away, told him I was going to call his parents, and escorted him to the door
• We finished the rest of the test just fine and dandy and I decided to sit in the next session where the kids would be learning the song “Five Little Ducks” and I got called out of the class by a TFC staff member 
• Apparently the student whom I asked to leave went to the main office crying because I misinterpreted the situation and now he was going to be punished by his parents for doing what turned out to be the right thing
• The student I dismissed explained to the TFC staff in Chinese that the person sitting next to him had asked him for the answer and the student I kicked out just happened to say no in a loud enough voice for me to hear.
• I took it with a grain of salt because that’s a story that he could say and get away with it due to the fact that no one could corroborate his story but I told him that I believed him and I told him (through a staff member) that next time just do a hand motion because he knew that I didn’t speak Mandarin that well and I definitely don’t speak dialect so if you’re telling him that you’re not going to give him the answer to a test question that I won’t be able to tell and I have to assume he’s cheating
• I gave him the test back and told him to finish it as well as he could at home and we’ll go over it together on Monday morning so with apologies from both sides we left
• Then I lost a student for the final week of the summer camp
• His mother texted me later that afternoon of the test saying that next week he was going away so he can’t attend class during the last week of the summer camp.
• I told his mother that he has a good student who will have a wonderful life and all that. Plus I told her how he improved his test score by 10% over last week and I was proud of him.
• But then I got one right back
• So I got a new student (who missed out on the initial registration period of the summer camp) on Tuesday who was the younger brother of one of the legitimate students I had  (the new student was going into 3rd grade and now he wanted to attend my 5th grade class) and I figured that as long as he was in here learning English then he was fine.
• I did make it a point to model for him that good behavior would allow him to stay but bad behavior would lead straight out of the doorway
• Turns out he's really good at English
• He's been studying English about one year less than the other students and he's right up there in the average scores on tests and homeworks so he's not that bad of a student after all
• If you only knew what those kids said behind your back
• I was in a meeting with my program manager and the other fellows who are overseen by my program manager and one of the fellows was talking about how they don’t know if a kid is talking about the teacher behind their back in dialect and my program manager quipped, “If you only knew what those kids were saying behind your back…”
• And I chimed in, “If those kids only knew what I said at them…”
• It is nice to displace frustration from those kids
• I have some kids that I knew were going to be troublemakers from the second day and so I made sure to give those kids some of the names of my friends back home so it is nice to go, “Kassi, what did I tell you about throwing your pencil case at Skye.”
• Curriculum is really fast
• We really rush through stuff so if the kids aren’t paying attention for one second we’ll go from ABC’s to using a gerund as a noun
• It's not like we're going from ABC's to intellectual conversations about mid-18th century Russian feminist philosophy in English but for kids who aren't constantly surrounded by English on a daily basis it's easy to fall behind
• It’s great for the kids who can keep up but for those who already started from behind you have to give them an extra push to get them to the level they need to be at
• The nice thing is that because this is summer camp instead of an actual school, kids are voluntarily coming here so at least I don’t have to really give an emotional taser to the desire of my kids to learn English
• Plus the curriculum has some nice quirks in it too
• Our 5th grade curriculum has a section in it where we learn a dialogue that has a part that goes, “Do you have a blue eraser? I want a blue elephant”
• A 3rd grade teacher related to us how she had to teach kids how to say, “I like balls” with a straight face
• Class average is on its way up-up-up
• So we gave the kids a midterm on Friday and the kids did a lot better than on their first test of the year with the class average going from 33% to 54%
• So basically my class is still failing English but at least kids are starting to get the hang of it (at least the 31% of the class who passed the mid-term)
• It was a pretty horribly written mid-term on my part
• I ended up throwing away two of the 45 questions or so because when I was grading the mid-terms I realized that all of my students kept getting these two questions wrong and then I realized, “Oh, I guess I never taught them that now that I think about it”
• And as always there were some kids who had some pretty funny answers
• I always seem to get kids that for some reason they say a question with the choices A-C and they write down the numbers 1-5 and I don’t know why (I guess they just have a horrible English teacher)

I guess the shortened word for Dad is England in Chinese

She was supposed to write a short introduction of herself but she instead decided to say...something

I've had an American flag hanging in my room for two weeks now but I guess one of my students thought it was the flag of "Asfna" which I don't know if that's better or worse than the 6 or so kids who thought this was the Australian flag

• Thank goodness I’m not becoming an art teacher
• I tried to draw a circle to represent a child’s face on Wednesday for our discussions of adjectives of personality (quiet, loud, funny, etc.) and I drew the most lopsided ovals this side of Yangtze river
• I wanted to give my visual learners something to remember, “Oh, funny looks like people laughing” but due to my recent hot streak of making kids cry, the message I might send across is, “Oh no, if we don’t memorize these vocab words Mr. Spencer is going to make our faces look as lopsided as those in the picture.”
• I’ve got this texting to parents thing down
• I’ve now realized that kids probably think I’m joking around when I say that I’m going to call their parents if they misbehave because they know that I can’t speak Mandarin (or dialect) but thanks to the wonderful advances of technology, I can now text parents with the help from a hodgepodge of Chinese fellows who have no sympathy for these kids and can help me craft the exact message I need
• However, one parent actually called me during lunch after I texted her saying her son’s behavior was bad one time and I can’t tell if she was explaining the situation or if she was ripping me a new one so I just found the nearest Chinese fellow I could find who spoke Chinese and English and I said, “Hear, you talk to her”
• But I have been balancing my karma
• For every text I send condemning a student, I make sure to send a good one (as long as China Unicom wants me to)
• There’s this little guy in my class we called Max who always sits by himself and is really eager to learn so I sent his mom a text message telling her that and it was so reaffirming to get a reply back telling me that he really loves English class
• AH AFFIRMATION OF TEACHING ABILITY, YOU TASTE SO GOOD!!!
• I need to watch out for my tones in class
• So the command for “Take notes clearly” when you want your students to take notes is 认真做笔记Rènzhēn zuò bǐjì but I forgot the last word jì  so I ended up saying either one of two things with one of them being really bad and I know this because every time I said the phrase without that jì  I constantly heard snickers
• 1. I could have said 认真作弊- Rènzhēn zuòbì which literally means “seriously cheating” or…
• 2. I could have said 认真做屄- Rènzhēn zuò bī which literally means “seriously do c***” and that’s the c-word that makes females female. And the only reason I think this might be a possibility because there’s a really slang Chinese word for “cool” that literally means “cow c***” that I learned in a slang Chinese book before I came here
• So next time, definitely adding the jì at the end
• TFC makes me feel so athletic
• I’ve never been athletic before in my life and I don’t know if I’ve lost weight since I’ve been here or my two week long vegetarian kick but man I’ve turned into a little bit of a beast since I’ve been here
• We went biking up to this school called “Bao Mai” (I’d write the characters if I could remember) and for the longest time I was in the lead among about 20 people and I was the only one who wasn’t dressed athletically (I was in jeans and a dress shirt for a 10 km bike ride that was 8 km uphill)

• Then in football I caught two touchdowns (and got to do the dirty bird dance once) which hasn’t happened since high school
• Of course it might not be the fact that I became more athletic or it might be the fact that everyone else is just getting less sleep
• I’ve been getting about 7-8 hours of sleep a night because I was lucky enough to finish all of my lesson plans last weekend but everyone else spends every night writing until 10 pm their lesson plan for 3 days in advance AND THEN preparing for tomorrow’s 8:30 AM class after that
• Due to this I won’t say that I’ve become a total beast at sports but maybe that weight I've lost is finally starting to help out my athleticism
• Home Visits
• So as part of Teach for China’s leadership rubric, we are tasked with engaging students and families and one way to do that is to do a home visit where a teacher goes to visit the home of a student
• This is extremely awkward for American fellows because teachers rarely do that and if they did it’s usually to tell the parents that little Johnny massacred a family of ducks or something horrible, but in China it’s a lot more common
• Plus there’s the fact that I only speak survival Chinese so if I asked a student if I could come to their house and they asked me why, the conversation would stop there and it would be pretty awkward after that
• Luckily I have a co-teacher who is fluent in Mandarin Chinese to ask our students to their home
• If it wasn’t for my co-teacher I would be completely hopeless and even if I would have gotten invited to a house I would have literally sat there and only ask simple questions like, “Do you like fruit?”
• It was a total blast to hang out with those kids
• We went to two houses on Saturday (Ana and Max) and we (Hanyun and I-the teachers of class  13) spent a total of 10 hours with them
• We talked (and by we I mean Hanyun and the student’s family) and then I brought out my iPad to play games with them like Angry Birds and Phonics Fun
• Not going to lie though, I now know that if there’s boys around that the games that involve shooting zombies are always the favorites
• StupidZombie does teach kids critical thinking skills after all due to the fact that kids have to figure out how to bounce bullets off of walls in order to kill/decapitate/violently blow up zombies
• Ana
• So Ana is this short little girl in our English class that when she grows up she wants to be a cake designer
• I told them about TLC’s onslaught of cake decorating shows and I know that if I can get my hands on some DVD’s I will find a legal way to download some of those episodes for her
• Ana is a total sweetheart
• Her parents were doctors and her rent for half of a two story apartment was only 440 RMB a month (which is less than $100 a month for an apartment in the heart of a city of 100,000+ people)
• When her dad called the house to ask if somebody could bring him some lunch to work, Ana, who is 11-years old volunteered to go by herself to deliver the meal
• Then after we had finished lunch she collected all of our plates and washed them by herself

• Max
• Max is a shy kid whose parents I sent a good text message to last week telling them how good Max was in order to both celebrate Max’s good behavior & improving scores and to balance my karma after sending text messages to parents of naughty students
• Little did I know that it actually meant more to Max than other kids because it turns out that Max’s grades are actually pretty poor during the school year so for Max’s parents to receive a text message telling them how good their son is caused them to thank me (through his aunt who was watching him over the summer)
• Max is a pretty shy kid but as soon as I told him and his cousin how to Crank That Soulja Boy he really opened up
• At first during the home visit we just sat and talked, then I pulled out my iPad and we played English games and I told the aunt some good ones from abiTALK which were pretty good, then I asked if he wanted to learn an American dance
• • He got the dance to Crank That Soulja Boy down pretty good but when I tried to teach them how to line dance it just didn’t work out that well
• And then swing dancing and salsa didn’t go so well either but it was just the fact that we (Hanyun and myself) got both Max and his cousin (whose English name is Candi because some idiot must have come across a list of stripper names trying to find English names) was well worth it

Me teaching kids the vocal chord vibration difference between S and Z

Soulja Boy-first you start off in this position

Lean with it, rock with it

YOUUUUUUUUUUUUU!

My failed ballet/salsa lesson with Max

• And then Max’s aunt treated us to Dai food
• The Dai minority in China live mainly in Yunnan and their food is pretty good (Max’s aunt paid for our meal) but I think my favorite part of the meal was the scenery of the restaurant (THEY HAD A PEACOCK) and the fact that me, Max, and Candi did everything with Mahjong tables except actually play Mahjong.