Rehearsal for the show and they a day’s worth of finishing things up, including making items to go on the mobiles that the students are making abut careers. 
One of the fascinating things about China is that, although they seem to have scotch tape refills, there doesn’t not appear to exist tape dispensers. (Someone said that they DID see one somewhere, but we haven’t been able to get a hold of them.) This leaves us with having to tear tape with our teeth or cut with highly inadequate scissors. This gets compounded with the students having very little patience/wait your turn skills. (My husband has a pondering whether this is part of a result of the one child policy. Maybe if you never have to share at home, you don’t learn those skills.)
Any way, I spent a couple of periods with students surrounding me hands in my face saying, ”Teacher, I need two.” And “Teacher, I need four pieces ” “Teacher, teacher!!!!!” Scream. I can only cut tape as fast as I can.
One of our young teachers helped the older students through a really clever building project with used water bottles and hot glue guns. They looked fabulous!
My last period’s class played 40 minutes worth of a game like Duck, Duck, Goose, first in Chinese and then in English. I taught the how to shout, “Go, go Go!” And “Faster, run faster!” Important English life skills!
These kids were going to have to sit for a long performance later and I thought that running them for along time was correct.
Is it just us? Here is a T-shirt that one of the Chinese teachers wore to school this week, saying, “Math sucks”. One of our teachers talked to her and asked if she understood that this mean that she hats math and thinks it is of no value. She agreed that this is what she meant. Then I was talking with children about their talents and asked the Chinese teacher to share what his talent was and he answered, “I am talent at drinking very much beer.” Hmmmm. Today a child also brought highly realistic gun to school which our staff felt very concerned over. The Chinese teachers thought nothing of it. They said that the child wanted to be a policeman so of course he would need a gun. If he brought the same gun to school in the US he would have been expelled. Different values, and different sense of what is “appropriate”.
The evening open house went quite well dispute the plans needing to change multiple times. As it turned out, there was a microphone in the room that I was assigned, which game me the lovely chance to talk and be heard, and to allow the children who wanted to do so, to read the essay they had written about their future career.
Then we played a highly rousing game of pull your career out of the imagination box and let people guess in English what you are acting out. Nearly all the students wanted to do this and it was very fun.
The performance went fine. All of our kids did a good job.
It was highly challenging to pull together another performance so soon on the heels of the one last Friday. It is especially hard to keep hundreds of kids quiet during the hour plus performance that they have mostly already seen, and for the little ones is way over their heads.
We tried a new addition of putting the words to songs and reading up on screen to help the audience. This worked well except somehow the automatic timer got set, so kept moving to the next slide unexpectedly. Ah technology.
We weren’t as tired as we were last week. But this is still a very intense project. One more week to go!
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