December 14th, 2013 - Teaching kids how to spell

• So during last week's oral English competition, I found out that my first grade students don't understand letters
• The first thing they learn in English is "A-B-C-D-E..."but to them it's just a song and few kids actually grasp the fact that "Oh, this is something that would be helpful to actually put into practice when learning English"
• I had so many kids confuse the word "dance" with the name of a character in their textbook ("Danny"), that I once told a kid in frustration, "Danny is dead!"
• Out of the 55 or so kids that I tested, only 1 pronounced dance as dance and not Danny
• ONE!
• So this week I taught them how to answer the question, "How do you spell (insert English word here)?" 
•  I can't tell you how many kids pronounced "i" as "e" because in Chinese phonics, that's how i is pronounced
• Then there was the case where a few students pronounced "j" as "g" but luckily there weren't that many of those kind of kids
• Then there's the letters that Chinese doesn't have like "x" and "v" where some of the kids just completely blanked on
• They would be reading the word so fast and then I knew when they blanked because they would just stop like they saw Brad Pitt walking down the street
• Me:"How do you spell 'cardboard box'?" 
• Student: "c-a-r-d-b-o-a-r-d b-o.......o.......o"
• Me: "Wrong, I wanted you to spell cardboard box, not cardboard booooooo"
• Got to teach a class on water safety
• I'm going to Taiwan and Hong Kong next week for vacation so I had to change some classes around in order to make up for my missed classes (we get December 24th and 25th off for Christmas as Shenzhen foreign teachers which is extremely nice)
• One of the classes I had to teach was a Chinese language teacher's class and normally I would have just taught them English because, that's my job, but I HAD to give them a powerpoint presentation on water safety so  I taught them about water safety in Chinese
• It was actually really easy, I just read the powerpoint presentation character-by-character with them
• It's really humbling when a 6 or 7-year old first grade student knows a Chinese character you don't
•  "Sorry kid, I'm not Chinese, let's see you read Macbeth and see how well you do (sticks out tongue)"
• Then there was the part where the screen was a little bit out of adjustment, and that all important "don't" word wasn't on the screen for students to see
• "So everyone, read with me, 'push and pull children into dangerous...' wait what?"
•  

12/3/2013-Thanksgiving and Alphabet Chase (Late publishing this post, sorry about that)

• So last week I taught Thanksgiving and we played alphabet chase
• My favorite part about it was when a student would ask, "Why doesn't China have a thanksgiving?" and I would reply with, "because Chinese people don't like to say thank you." (which is completely true by the way)
• I think that most of the kids forgot the Thanksgiving food words I taught them (with the exception of "Turkey") but at least they'll remember the pictures of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade
• This was the reaction from my first graders

• The thing I love most about my job is being a cultural ambassador
• I remember when I was in 3rd grade there was a woman who came to my elementary school from Japan and taught us all about Japanese culture
• Now I get to do her job every day and boy is it a great feeling
• I think the kids enjoyed "alphabet chase" too
• Basically, I would say "Find a word on page 8 that starts with the letter X" and all of the kids would frantically turn to page 8 and try to find a word that started with the letter X
• The funniest parts always came when one kid would just be so proud of himself, find the word that started with the letter I wanted it to start with, but...they would be on the wrong page
• Then there was always the student who just didn't get the whole, "start with..." part and would always find a word that had the letter in it, but not start with the letter...eh
• Business School Decision Date is getting closer and closer
• December 20th is the magic date when I should know which business school I'll be indebted to for the next 20 years will be
• All joking aside, I'm really, really anxious and the sooner it comes, the better

November 23rd, 2013 - Prepositions, Sports Day, and Business School Tour

• Sorry I didn't update my blog for a while
•  The week before last nothing happened so I didn't feel like updating my blog saying, "My wife's friend came over, made us delicious soup, and we all watched Saving Private Ryan together which was awesome"
• I'll never get used to British English
• I learned that in Britain they say that "the cinema is in main st." but in America we say that "the cinema is on main st."
• I learned this because my 3rd grade students "corrected" me right in the middle of class
• I, speaking American English and all and having no knowledge of British English, would not back down to a bunch of per-pubescents and stood my ground
• Then I learned that we were both right
• My co-workers informed me later that British English is just like that but I have no choice but to continue speaking my degenerate American English
• Teaching prepositions
• That was a struggle at first
• This week I taught my students how to answer "Where's Mr. Panda?"  by answering "Mr. Panda is____ the book" with under, on top of, inside, etc.
• Luckily I just used a lot of photobomb pictures which made the kids almost cry laughing
• That sure made teaching easier

• Sports Day
• Luckily we got two days off from teaching this week for the kids to do sports day (which means that grammatically it should be "Sports Days" but this competition was never about English so who cares)
•  Refereeing the high jump and the long jump was ridiculously fun
• After the kids got done doing the high jump I got a chance to be immature and see how high I could jump/see how hard I could land on the landing mats without breaking any bones
• With the long jump I was responsible for seeing if a student's foot crossed the special "Don't Cross This Line" line by raising either a red or white flag which was as easy as it sounds

• School Visit-Sun Yat Sen Business School
• I now truly understand why Chinese students want to go abroad to go to college because after seeing what the 4th or 5th best university in China is like, I have a new found appreciation for my alma mater
• The classrooms and whatnot were great in terms of facilities and equipment, it was just everything else about the university that left a little to be desired
• Honestly, I'm being a little bit stuck up comparing Sun Yat Sen's campus to Vanderbilt but when you have moss growing on the side of a building, I mean give me a break
• It's moss, it's not like it just popped up last night out of nowhere, just clean it off already
• Plus, the dining/living facilities weren't as nice
• I would have had to live off-campus (which was going to be really cheap)
• The best thing about it was the cost
• It was REALLY cheap to do this program instead of an American one (about $30,000 USD over two years) but I would have had to have waited until after I applied to see if I would get any sort of scholarship
• Plus the faculty and staff seemed nice
• Honestly, it's a nice school but I wasn't really digging it
• Looks like I'll be going elsewhere for business school

 

11/08/2013-Surprise, you're going on a field trip!

• My week went extremely well this week
• On Monday, we were told that us teachers were all invited to go with our school's students to go to Shenzhen's Sea World Park for free
• This is great news because in Shenzhen, the teachers get to go and do their own thing while tour guides lead the children so I didn't have to spend my day yelling at the kids "Don't put that in your mouth!"
•  And I got to shake a dolphin's hand which was AWESOME!

Here's our bus drivers resting after delivering 1800 or so kids to a theme park (I think they deserved it)

Shirley was a lot happier than this picture indicates