Well, sometimes when you are working in a foreign culture things change or get confused in the translation. We THOUGHT that we were staying late after school today to do a dress rehearsal with the 400 students, but instead, the school had rented out the auditorium to a group that was doing a dance program so it was not available. Sigh! Scramble! We were able to stagger having the groups run into the auditorium for a half hour each (the hundred students/four classes in each TEAM), and then each group found another space to rehearse for much of the remainder of the day. The children are really good sports about things are want so much to please, even thought what we ask them to do keeps changes ALL of the time.
Our kids are going to do a great job. You should really hear what they sound like singing “The Lion Sings Tonight”. They really wail on the Ayeeeeeeeeeeee eummmmaway! Somehow, tomorrow night we’ll do it and it will be lovely. In the meantime, we are having more practices tomorrow and the schedule will change again. It is a very ambitious schedule to have a performance every Friday for three weeks, all with children who are English Language Development learners.
We have a really talented group of teachers and we are working our hind ends off. Everyone was exhausted by the time we got on the bus.
Today I told “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and “The Wide Mouth Frog”. I also taught some kids the game of Extreme Ring-around the Rosie…they were so brain-dead after rehearsing so much, they needed to run around. Luckily I have the air-conditioned room. I taught them the song and then “We all fall down” ended up with us all laughing on the floor, them we would get up and someone would say “Again” and we’d start over. These Chinese students can learn songs remarkably quickly. I also taught one group “Make new friends, but keep the old” today and they got after hearing it a couple of times. That makes it really fun to do songs. They often don’t understand the vocabulary, so we often have great discussions about things, like the word for “sneeze” in English and Chinese.
In several classes they will teach me the words in Chinese for things and repeat it over and over until I pronounce it right. Then they applaud for me. A Chinese English teacher told me that I have a good accent. A student caught me at the end class today and told me that I had pronounced a word incorrectly with a sh instead of a s sound. It had been bothering her. Smile.
After dinner, a walk over to get another hour long foot massage. Oh, it is a tough life to have to get massages every day or two!
Oh yeah, they announced that a typhoon is headed this direction. It is called Pacific Ocean Tropical Storm Conson over the south China Sea. It may arrive on Sunday (the day we are planning to go to a local cool ethnic cultural center park. We’ll keep you posted as to what being in a typhoon is really like. Winds of up to 80 mph and driving rain. We are all hoping it maybe will hold off until Monday rather than on our weekend. Hmmmm typhoons. How about a regular old fashioned earthquake or tornado?
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