Slacking

I've been doing that when it comes to the blogging world. Sorry folks.

Thursday:
I had an uneventful ELE class, talking about colors and fruits. The kids had never heard of grapes or cherries before. With my ILP classes, I played Hot Potato with several different objects as the "hot potato." These kids are so competitive, they love any game where someone gets out, or as they say, "game over." Megan, Laurra, and I went to the night market and tried these wraps that were SO good! It was a tortilla filled with egg, spinach, green onions, carrots, bean sprouts, and all kinds of spices. Kate took a picture of me eating it but it seriously might be the most disgusting photograph ever taken. I'm doing you the favor of sparing such photograph from your vision. I'm going to be craving this kind of stuff when I get back to America.

Friday:
By the way, I've been sick. Again. At least this sickness doesn't involve losing 23 pounds in less than three weeks. Getting out of bed today wasn't really my thing. My throat and head hurt SO flippin' bad. The last thing I wanted to go was go chant about colors and fruits for the fourth time this week. Last Friday, the computer was broken in my ELE class. The situation was unresolved when I showed up this morning. I had to read a book, which felt so amazing on my blistered throat. This ELE class is taught with Angela, the child beater, and every single thing I say, she makes them repeat it. Repeat is not even the word. They yell. Yell so loud that I leave that class with ringing ears every Friday. That did wonders for my headache as well.

ILP class consisted of reading a book and talking about the story. My SPE this week is Gym. I'm really good at following my lesson plans, obviously. And- it was Parent's Day at the school. So I had a bunch of parents coming into my room to observe me. They could care less what I was teaching, they were just focused on my hair. I've had to get over the urge to shower every time someone pets me. If I hadn't, I'd be showering 27 times a day. It was really sad, because some of the kids were expecting their parents to show up and they didn't, so they were hysterical. It broke my heart a little bit.

Jackson was crying today because he didn't get candy in Teacher Laurra's class. Mike, being the good little soul that he is, was consoling him nearly the entire class period. He is just the sweetest thing.

I actually ventured into the cafeteria for dinner today. I gagged my way up the stairs to eat like four bites of green beans and then I left. Many of you know that I work in a hospital. I am exposed to several gag-worthy occurrences and smells every shift. Puke, poop, phlegm, you name it, I smell it/see it/get it splattered on me. Nothing there phases me. The smell of the cafeteria is comparable to roadkill being microwaved or something. Or even like that time I cooked a rotten roast in the crockpot because it had been in the freezer so I assumed it was good for like ever. My mom was in Mexico. That's what happens when your kids try to make a decent dinner while you're gone!

After dinner, we met at the big statue in the courtyard because we had been invited to eat moon cakes with the kids for the mid-Autumn Festival. This is something that is so hard to get used to about China. I don't mean eating moon cakes, I mean the fact that they tell you one thing and then drag you into something completely different. The Chinese teachers showed up and divided us into groups depending on what grade we taught. The next thing we know, we're being led into the classrooms one at a time with trays of moon cakes and being handed plastic gloves, all the while someone is filming the event. We were serving the kids moon cakes. It was a ton of fun and the kids loved seeing us walk into their classrooms. It was just totally different than what we were expecting. Welcome to China.

Kate and I then walked some of our students out to the gate where their parents were waiting. Most of the kids stay at the school all week but a few go home every night. When I got back to my room, Megan came over and we were talking about what it will be like to leave our kids. I teared up at the thought, knowing that I will never see any of them again. It's a beautiful but somewhat cruel fact of being an ILP teacher.

A flower I found outside my students' classroom. For some unknown reason, I can't rotate the picture to it's correct position. Just tilt your head to the left. Same effect.