2013/10/10-National Day and Oral English Competition

• So every month this year, I plan on holding an oral English competition because it gives me a chance to test my students oral English abilities in a one-on-one fashion and I get to give out awards which makes me feel happy
• Basically, the competition involves reading out loud 3 words and 3 sentences written on a piece of paper and answering 3 questions that I orally ask them such as "How are you?", "What color is my t-shirt?" What's the square root of 81?", etc.
• What I do is pull students out of the classroom one at a time out into the hallway (the ones who are willing to participate that is, about half of my kids aren't in the upper grades) and the rest of my students can sit in the classroom, watch a movie, do homework, read a book, do tarot readings, etc.
• Then the next time I'm in front of my computer at work, I put the top 5 students' names in a template, print out the awards, and then hand them to the students in front of their classmates the next week.
• I was thinking of having one class where I teach kids how to do touchdown dances so that once they receive one of my awards they can rub it in the other kids' faces but then I thought their parents' might not enjoy watching their little child try to chest bump grandma
• National Day
• So everyone in China get 8 days off for National Day and that turns it into the absolute worst time to do any form of tourism to major tourist spots
• Just imagine what a nation of 1.4 billion people taking their one of three big chances to go travel to a major historic site would be like
• There was a story for this park called Jiuzhaigou which is kind of like the Yellowstone of China and there were so many tourists that tickets for the park sold out in the first couple of hours every single day and that hundreds of people were left stranded inside the park for hours because there weren't enough buses inside the park to transport them all

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Luckily, Shirley and I went to Foshan and a beach that's far, far away and barely had any people there
• It was nice because I guess all the people that live in Foshan, Guangdong went somewhere else for vacation
• I have pictures to prove I was there, but my cell phone currently doesn't want to connect to my computer so you'll just have to take my word for it.