End of the first semester

• This semester is over!
• Finals were actually on Monday (keep in mind I teach at an elementary school so that means they're giving 7 and 8-year olds final exams) but today was officially the final day of class for the first semester
• It was also the awards ceremony or as I like to call it, "the everyone gets an award" ceremony where the principal made every student grab their chair from their desk to bring outside so they could sit down while the award ceremony happened
• I like the strategy of giving a lot of certificates as it gives kids something to be proud of and it gives kids a lot of leveraging power with their parents ("But dad, I won 7 awards this semester, we should totally be able to go to Hong Kong Disney Land)
• Plus, this ceremony was a testimony to how good our students' behavior was because not a single chair fight broke out as 1000 students tried to maneuver their way through 4 flights of stairs with chairs about half to 3/4 of the size they are

 

• And my school/Shenzhen is so good to me
• My vice-principal said that he doesn't understand why "America is so nice to its citizens and not to foreigners, but China is not nice to its own citizens but so nice to foreigners"?
• So I said, "Well, I guess you should become an American"
• He said that he had been working as a vice-principal and teacher for over 20 years and he hasn't once received a rice cooker, but I've been working here for 3 months and I get so much free stuff/trips/parties
• They gave me a free kitchen knives set, chopping table, towels, and a rice cooker, so all in all about $100 in free gifts

• Finals week was really easy for me though
• Basically I had no tests during the year so I'm definitely not going to have a final
• It's not easy for the kids though
• With the exception of the usual 2.5 hour break they have for lunch, from 8 AM-5 PM all of our students are sitting down, taking their final exams in English, Chinese, and Science/Math
• I'm not sure when everyone will know the results of their final exams, but from the outset it looks like people aren't super ecstatic about their test scores, but they're not depressed about it either
• As an oral English teacher, my task was to grade tests for the 6th graders and you don't realize how many students there are in a classroom until you have to grade their exams
• There were so...many...tests
• But luckily our arguments about English grammar kept things alive
• There was one part where students were given information on three other students and the 6th grader had to write a sentence using "Amy is better than John", "Amy is the best student",etc.
• Well one of the categories was "hard-working" and one student wrote, "Aaron is the hard-workingest" and I initially marked him wrong because I can do this thing where I move my lips and fairly decent English comes out of my mouth, but then a teacher made me mark it right because, according to their book, any adjective can be transformed into a superlative by adding "-est" to it, and if the book says it's this way, then so it must be
• After I ripped my hair out, I said, "fine" because even if I marked it wrong, the student's grade would only go from 94 to 93
• Then we talked about the word "usedn't", and how a Chinese-born English teacher told me how to use it and how I informed that teacher that this word doesn't exist
• Apparently, back in the day, English students in China somehow studied the word "usedn't" and now the older generation of English teachers in China will sometimes use the word
• For the record, you're supposed to use "usedn't" as a contraction for "not used to" as in "I'm usedn't speaking good English"