Getting ready for another performance tomorrow night. This week’s performance isn’t going to be as wonderful as last week, but it will be fine. We have been practicing little “runway” pieces where select students talk about their future careers. They are very sincere, and do a great job with these. We have an animal scientist, a writer (who will go to the coffeehouse shop everyday), a model, a mathematician, and a very famous basketball player.
Then they will be singing a rousing version of I’ve Been Working on the Railroad. We needed a simple song about careers so that one fit the bill. We had some squeamish feeling about having Chinese children sing this after the tragic history of the number of Chinese Americans who suffered and died building the railroad in the US, but we were assured that that doesn’t mean anything to the Chinese people. They did a cute job and sing with gusto.
We had a super chaotic rehearsal which was so hard. In some ways, too many teachers can kind of spoil the soup...to mix a metaphor. And we were trying to practice as the rain was POUNDING down on the roof. You couldn't hear the kids or yourself think.
At the end of the practice, we still had 15 minutes left to go, so I told the 100 students an interactive version of the story about the very noisy house. The children were quite shy about making the sounds of cows and chickens, but I think they enjoyed hearing the story. I so love telling stories to kids, especially when they are new to them.
The time is going by so swiftly. Tomorrow will be the final day of the second week. Wow!
I also did a tremendously successful exercise with the older two Advanced beginner groups teaching them about business cards and the role of business cards: why do adults have them. Then I had two children at a time come up in front of the group and present and received cards (both which two hands). Then we had a discussion about whether or not these two students could do business with one another. My favorite was the basketball player and singer. At first everyone said that they couldn’t do business together, but then I talked with them about the signing of the national anthem in America before very basketball game. They didn’t know the term national anthem, so I asked if they had watched the Beijing Olympics? Remember when the first wins and they put up the flag and the play the most important song to that country. Then I had them sing their national anthem and I sang a part of the Star Spangled Banner. It was fabulous. All of the students who did it were able to brainstorm some way they could possibly do business together.
This worked wonderfully. There was a lot of real life conversation, as well as true-life career skills.
We are making plans to go to another city, Guangzhou on Saturday. The time is so precious; we are trying very hard to stretch things as far as we can. So much China, so little time.
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Did I mention that they really don’t have driers in China? Even in the nicer apartments (really no one in the city can live in a house) they have washing machines and they hang the clothes to dry on their balconies. We can see some clothes drying every day from the school where we are teaching. Just another interesting thought about China.
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